Border Crossings: A Catherine James Thriller (7 page)

Shortly after midnight, the black
Suburban turned down a dirt road.  They had been crisscrossing back roads to avoid any law enforcement, even once cutting through a field when Hector became nervous about headlights ahead.  All the while Yesenia and Silvia had sat in silence.  Silvia kept looking at Yesenia with questioning eyes, and Yesenia had made the gesture of a gun and pointed back to the horror they’d left behind.  Slowly, Silvia began to realize what had happened.  She and Yesenia let their eyes do the rest of the talking to one another.

At the end of the dirt road they came to a crude fence with rectangular structures ahead of it.
  As they approached two large Rottweilers greeted them barking aggressively.  Jose got out and called to one of the dogs, “
Hola, Chico
.”  The animals seemed to recognize their master and began wagging their tails.  The man then opened the fence and the Suburban continued on into a little clearing where four very old mobile homes sat in a makeshift compound.  An old woman wearing a muumuu and smoking a cigarette came out of one of the mobile homes followed by a man who looked similar to the two young men who had driven Yesenia and Silvia.  The girls were dismayed to see he was armed with a pistol sticking out of his jeans.

The old woman moved like a cow, her chin tucked downward and her stride heavy and slow as her slippers shuffled along, the cigarette held between yellowed fingertips before she flicked it away.  Behind her, the younger man walked leisurely with a caballero swagger, sharkskin boots on his feet and an ivory bolero around his neck.

The old woman walked over and kissed Jose on the cheek in greeting.  “Everything good?” she asked.

He held his head down slightly.  “No, we had problems.  It’s bad.”

“What kind of problems?” asked the old woman as Hector got out of the vehicle as well.  The two men looked at one another.  “What happened?” she asked them.

“We had to shoot someone, Mama . . . a police officer.”

The woman put her hands to her cheeks and gasped.  Then, without warning, she rose up on her tiptoes, her slippers remaining flat but her heels suddenly popping out of them, and she smacked Jose hard on his head, “
Idiota
!”

“You killed him?” asked the man with the bolero.

“You shut up,” spat the old woman at him, turning back to Jose.  “How could you be so stupid?”

“We had to, Mama.  He pulled us over and smelled the marijuana,” Jose whined as a child might as he rubbed his head.

“And why were you pulled over?” asked the woman.  “Were you speeding?”

“No, Mama.”

She looked at the two men disapprovingly.  “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

“We had the fake plates,” said the other man.  “And he didn’t have time to run the driver’s license.”

“Did you get the video?” asked the woman.

The men looked confused.  “What video?”

She smacked him on the head again, “They have cameras, you idiot.  They keep the video in the trunk.  You didn’t get it?”

“No,” he admitted.

She mumbled curses at them before saying, “Well, at least you didn’t get caught.  You’ll have to get rid of this thing, though,” she gestured towards the Suburban where Yesenia and Silvia were just getting out.

“It’s fine.  I can just paint it.  I don’t want to get rid of it.”

She scowled at him.  “Fine, paint it, then.  But make sure it looks different.  It can’t look anything like it does now.  Put different wheels on it, change everything.”

As Yesenia and Silvia got out the two large dogs sniffed around their legs and both girls huddled together.  The dogs looked as big as they were.

Jose looked towards them and told the woman, “They saw.”

The old woman looked at the girls and walked over, “Oh, they did, eh?”  She gestured to the
Suburban and told the man who had accompanied her, “unload it.”  Then she looked to the girls.  “I’ll have a talk with them.”  She walked up to Yesenia and poked her in the ribs with her index finger, “And which one are you?”  She kept on poking her like a schoolyard bully pushing a smaller child around.  Yesenia was so unnerved she couldn’t find her voice.  “Well?  Out with it!  What’s your name?” asked the woman.  One of the dogs had his nose in her crotch and Yesenia remained speechless.

Silvia spoke up instead, “Yesenia.  Her name is Yesenia.”

The old woman wheeled around and smacked Silvia on the head like she had done Jose, “Was I talking to you?”  Silvia cowered and remained silent as the woman turned back to Yesenia.  “Now, then, I’m talking to you, girl.  What’s your name?”

“Yesenia,” she finally managed.

“Yesenia Flores, yes?” said the woman.

“Yes, ma’am.”  The dog was still pressing itself against her and Yesenia stood tense in fear that it would attack.

The woman scolded the dog, “
Oye, Chico
.  Hah!  Go on, now!”  She waved her arms at him and the dog ran off with the other one underneath one of the mobile homes, still wagging his tail as though he’d enjoyed angering the old woman.

Yesenia relaxed a little
, but then the old woman grabbed her by the chin.  “Well, I know all about you, Yesenia Flores, including your sister in Mexico City.”  She let go and turned to Silvia, “And you!  I know all about you, too.”  She stared at both the girls menacingly, “So did you see these men shoot anyone?”  Silvia looked at Yesenia in confusion, but she caught on as Yesenia shook her head, no.  “What’s that?” asked the woman.  “Speak up!”

“We didn’t see anything,” said Yesenia.

“I was asleep,” said Silvia honestly.  “I didn’t see anything.”

“Ah, well, that’s good for you, isn’t it?  You just remember that.”  She circled around the girls, sizing them up.  “I’m Miss Lydia,” she told them.  “I run things here.  You behave and do like you’re told, and we’ll get along and things will be good for you.  But if you don’t,” she wagged her finger at them, “things won’t be good for you.”

She stopped in front of Silvia and stared at her.  Silvia felt very uncomfortable and looked to Yesenia for support, but Yesenia kept her head down.  Suddenly the old woman grabbed one of Silvia’s breasts.  She was so shocked she didn’t have the nerve to pull away.  She stood at attention like a soldier while the old woman felt her up.  “How old are you?” asked the woman as she squeezed and pressed on Silvia’s body.  She moved her hand from Silvia’s breast down to her hip and pinched her love handles.

“Um, eighteen,” Silvia answered nervously.

“Huh,” said the woman.  “A little chubby, aren’t ya.”  It wasn’t a question.  “Well, we’ll fix that.”

She moved in front of Yesenia and tried to repeat the process, but when she grabbed her breast Yesenia pulled away.  The old woman hit her on the head and yanked Yesenia back in place.  “Stand still,” she told her, and continued her examination.  Yesenia complied, her jaw clenched in anger.  “Don’t be such a prude,” said the woman.  She pressed, pinched, and squeezed while Yesenia fumed in humiliation.  “You’re not so bad,” the woman finally said.  Then she addressed both girls again, “Now, Arnulfo will show you where you sleep.  The other girls will explain the rules to you.  You’d better learn them fast, or else you’ll learn the hard way.  The first rule is you behave and do as you’re told.  And don’t get it in your head you’re going to run off somewhere.  There’s nowhere to go and my dogs let me know if anyone is coming or going that shouldn’t be.  Now, off with you.”

The man with the sharkskin boots told the girls to follow him and led them to one of the mobile homes.  It was an odd pink that had become weatherworn to a dreary color, like a red that’d been washed too many times.

“You’ll be staying here,” said the man as he opened the door.

“Here?” asked Silvia.  “You mean this is it?”

“Of course here,” said the man.  “Where did you think you were going?”

“But this is the middle of nowhere.”

“That’s how Miss Lydia likes it.  The girls will explain things.  Just do what you’re told and you’ll be fine.”

Catherine shifted uncomfortably in her seat.  The first flight she could catch ended up being early in the morning and she was already dreading the hours lost.  She knew enough about kidnappings to know that the first hours were the most important.  Still, it had been the best she could do under the circumstances.  It seemed Cancun was suddenly on a lot of people’s travel plans, either going to for the media or coming back by the hordes of early departing vacationers.

It wasn’t a very long plane ride but she hated the blackout of information.  There would be no CNN on this flight, which she’d been glued to the whole night before, and she was still woefully ignorant of what steps had already been taken, having only what she got from the news last night and what Jim told her on the phone the day before.  Her clients weren’t going to like her suddenly dropping everything, but she didn’t care.  This wasn’t the type of request where you tell a friend you’re too busy. 
That poor girl,
she thought. 
And poor Jim.
  She could only imagine what he and Amy were going through right now.  She looked down at her watch and groaned to herself.  Every minute ticking away was precious lost time.  She thought about the one time she’d met Taylor Woodall.  It was around the time of her own great tragedy.  Her fiancé, David, had been good friends with Jim, which is how she became friends with him.  David and Jim were both avid cyclists and rode on the same team each year for the Austin MS-150 charity challenge.  But one early morning as David had been on a ride, he’d been struck and killed at a fairly quiet intersection that had a bush that stuck out too far, blocking the truck’s view, and a driver who was going too fast, running late for his shift.  Several months later she’d been in Houston on a case, and after the trial had called Jim to see if he wanted to get together.  Much to her surprise he invited her over for dinner with the family.  Taylor had been just fifteen or so, a very pretty girl, she remembered, smart and outgoing.

It wasn’t surprising Jim would think to call her.  He knew she did a lot of international law involving things mostly a little further south in South America, but occasionally her travels led to Mexico and she knew a few people here and there who were some decent people to know in a crisis.  She wasn’t sure how much help her casual contacts could be under the circumstances, nor how much help she could be for that matter, but it was something.  And right now something was better than nothing.

When the plane touched down she ran into some issues with customs and it took a couple of phone calls to get sorted out.  But it wasn’t long until she was in a similar taxi to the one that Taylor, Kendra, and Jamie had taken the night before last, and on her way to the hotel where it all happened.  She was shocked when she pulled up to the resort.  It looked so, well, vacationly . . . not the sort of place anyone would have guessed that something like what had happened could happen.  That, in itself, she found unnerving.

Two days after seeing the men with the body in the graveyard, Juan and Julio were in the market square looking through trashcans for something to eat.  “Who do you think she was?” Juan was asking Julio.

“I don’t know,” he answered.  He was elbow deep in an effort to fish out a quarter of a burrito someone had thrown away.  He pulled it out, swatted it a few times to get some coffee kernels off of it, ripped it in two, and handed Juan the other piece.  “Looks okay,” he told him.

Juan took it happily.  “She looked white,” he said around a mouthful of tortilla.

“She was,” said Julio.  He thought again about the gangsters and what would happen if they knew the boys had seen them.  “I don’t think we should talk about it.  It’s best to pretend it never happened.”

Juan finished his piece of burrito in one bite.  “I’m still hungry,” he told Julio.

“Me, too.  Go check that one,” he said, pointing to another trashcan.

Juan ran to another bin and began rummaging through it.  He held up a piece of bread but then something else caught his eyes.  He put the bread back in the trash and called to Julio, “Look!”

“What?” asked Julio perturbed, still looking through the trashcan where he’d found the burrito.  “You find anything good?”

“Yes!” cried Juan.

Julio looked up expecting to see Juan holding food, but instead he had a newspaper in his hand.

“What about it?” he asked.

Juan ran over with the paper.  “Look at the picture, blond hair.”

Julio took the paper and stared at the front page.  Neither boy could read, but there were two pictures, one a color photograph of a girl with blond hair wearing a cap and gown, the other a sketch of a man.  In the sketch the man wore a chain with a medallion, and next to both pictures, a very big number with the easy-to-recognize symbol for American dollars.

“What does it say?” asked Juan.

“I don’t know,” said Julio.

“That’s them, right?  She could be the woman and this guy is wearing a necklace like the guy we saw, right?”

Julio stared at the picture and tried to remember what the body he’d seen looked like.  The hair was right, so was the skin tone, but the facial features were hard to match.  Still, it was a dead body they’d seen.  That might make her look different, he figured.  And the sketch did look like the man from the graveyard, especially with the necklace.  “Maybe,” he told Juan.

“I think it’s her,” said Juan.  “See?  That says American, right?”  He pointed at the headline,
American Tourist Kidnapped!
  He’d seen the word America or American many times, and it was one of the few he could recognize.  “And what’s that?”  He pointed to the reward part, but although they both knew it was a dollar amount, neither recognized the word reward although they figured rightly what it was.  “It’s a reward, isn’t it?”

Julio looked at the girl in the picture and thought deeply.  He knew his basic numbers but did not know how much the number in the paper was.  It was a lot, though.  The more zeros, the more money, he knew.  And just like that his curiosity overcame his fear.  He wanted to know more.

The boys decided to take the paper to a nearby vendor everyone called Auntie Nita.  She worked a little lemonade stand that also sold chicken and beef kabobs.  She was old and hobbled about on a cane, spending most of her time sitting in a little plastic chair, either cutting the chicken and beef into little cubes, or cooking it over a little wood-burning stove.  Her bad leg kept her from standing all day, pouring lemonade or ringing up sales, and she probably would have been unable to run her little stand if not for the assistance of her niece, Maria, a young woman in her late 20s with a round face and a big smile.  Auntie Nita was missing most of her teeth and her tongue seemed to constantly be moving around her gums, as if though she were always checking to make sure her few remaining ones were still there.  Her face was wrinkled and her gray hair always pulled back so tight in a bun that it looked like a helmet, and as the boys had learned over time, she was a very grumpy old woman.  But she was also a very informed woman, another thing they’d learned about her over time.  That tended to be the case with nosey people who were always listening in about others.  Plus, her niece was always very good to the boys, so they decided it’d be the best place for them to learn a bit of news.

As they walked up to the counter Maria greeted them with a friendly, “
Hola, niños
.”  She looked over her shoulder.  Auntie Nita was watching them carefully, stabbing little chicken chunks with a wooden stick.  “I can’t give you any lemonade,” she whispered, “Auntie Nita’s watching.  But if you wait around, she’ll go to the bathroom soon, and I’ll give you a cup to share.”  Auntie Nita had a bladder as bad as her leg.  The boys had been coming to the market almost a year, and Maria was one of the few vendors who didn’t chase them away and curse them.  Instead, she was always kind and sometimes gave them lemonade or the occasional kabob when Auntie Nita hobbled off to relieve herself, something which Auntie Nita suspected and absolutely abhorred.  So she was none too happy to see the boys this day.

“Are you giving those little street urchins free lemonade?” she asked from her chair.

“No, Auntie!” said Maria.  But Auntie Nita got up from her chair anyway.

“What do you want?” she asked the boys.  “Do you have money?  If you don’t have any money then you have no business here.  Go away before you scare away my customers.”

“Please,” said Julio, “we were just wondering what this says.”  He pushed the paper on the counter.

Auntie
Nita looked at the paper and the boys as if annoyed with them, but she picked it up anyway.  Her eyes squinted, and her lips moved a bit as she tried to form the words, her tongue occasionally flicking forward along her gums.  Maria leaned over her shoulder, “It’s about the American girl that’s missing,” she said, both to the boys and to Auntie Nita.

Auntie
Nita looked at her reproachfully, and then back at the paper again as though swiftly reading it.  She handed it back to the boys, “Ah, yes,” she said.  “So it is.  My eyes aren’t what they once were, so it takes me a moment to focus is all.”  She’d already heard about the story, anyway, so she didn’t really need to read the whole thing to know what it said.  “You shouldn’t be so nosey,” she told the boys.  “But if you must know, a tourist got shot and another one disappeared and everybody’s looking for her.  They’re offering a reward.”

“How much?” asked Juan, excited.

The woman eyed them suspiciously.  She leaned towards the boys, “Enough.  Why? What business is it of yours?  Have you seen this woman?”  Her wrinkly hand pointed to the picture and her tongue swirled around behind her lips.

Juan’s face lit up in a smile and he looked as though he was about to tell them everything, from start to finish, but Julio stopped him by stomping on his foot.  Juan, not quite grasping why Julio stomped his foot, quickly responded by kicking Julio in his shin.  Julio, unfazed, still managed to recover the situation.  “No, we just thought she was a famous singer.  I told Juan she was, but he said she was an actress.  We were just trying to settle it.”

Juan suddenly realized his error in letting his face say too much, so he nodded in agreement.  It seemed to have worked, at least for the moment. She looked at them as if waiting for one to crack, but could read nothing definitive in their wide-eyed faces.  “Well, if you do see anything, you come tell me and I’ll help you boys.  You’re too young to get a reward, anyways.  You’d have to get an adult, so if you see or hear anything, you come tell your Auntie Nita and I’ll give you both some lemonade and a skewer each, and also help you get the reward money, okay?”

“Okay,
Auntie,” promised Julio.

“Okay, then,” she told them.  “Off with you.”

As the boys ran off Juan was practically skipping in excitement, “I knew it!  That’s who we saw.  We know where she is!”

“Be quiet,” said Julio.

“I wonder how big the reward is.”

“Stop jumping around.  She’s still watching us.”

Juan looked over his shoulder and Auntie Nita was indeed following them with her eyes.  As they scampered off and out of sight, she turned to Maria,  “I don’t want you giving them free lemonade.  They’re like dogs; they’ll keep coming back if you feed them.”

“Yes,
Auntie,” Maria sighed.

Later that afternoon
Auntie Nita began to have a gnawing feeling. 
Those boys know something,
she thought.  She couldn’t get Juan’s expression out of her mind.  He’d been excited when she told him what the paper said.  And the way they’d walked away, with him practically skipping and the other looking over his shoulder . . . they knew something.  She told Maria she was going to run an errand and went to the
caseta
.  There on the wall was the hotline number for Taylor Woodall.  She dialed the number and reached the anti-kidnapping unit.  “I’m calling because I think these two street urchins might know something.”  She was transferred to one of the Detectives and told him about the incident.  “If they do know something and it leads to the girl, then I would be the one to get the reward, yes?  After all, I’m the one calling.  Those two are just trying to hide something, but I’m trying to help.”

“Yes, yes,” assured the officer, “don’t worry.  Now, are they still there at the market?”

“No, they ran off, but they’ll be back.  They always come back.”

“Here, let me give you my direct number.  If you see them again, you call me directly.”