Down Among the Dead Men (A Thriller) (37 page)

Vargas dialed his number and listened to it ring. “Make it twenty,” he said.

And Ortiz hit the gas.

T
HEY FOUND HER
on the beach, using the ring of the cell phone to guide them. The lighthouse sat shining in the distance, on a rocky patch of land that jutted out toward the ocean.

She was lying faceup in the sand, a pale, naked figure, out cold, still clutching Vargas’s phone in her hand.

Vargas’s first instinct was to panic, but then he felt for a pulse and got a strong one.

She was alive. A bit battered and bruised, but alive.

Ortiz brought a blanket from the trunk of the Barracuda and they wrapped it around her. And as Vargas pulled her into his arms, Beth stirred, looking up at him.

“Easy,” he said. “Easy.”

When she realized who it was, she heaved a soft sigh and threw her arms around him.

“Nick…”

They kissed, and Vargas suddenly realized how worried he’d been. He’d kept his emotions crammed deep, but now that he’d found her and she was alive and in one piece, his relief was a tangible, living thing.

When he’d seen the condition of the Jaguar, and Mr. Blister’s broken body inside, Vargas couldn’t fathom how Beth had managed to escape.

Breaking from the kiss, Beth said, “We have to go. We have get to Ciudad de Almas.”

“We’re not going anywhere until you see a doctor.”

She pulled away from him. “No, we have to go now. Rafael told me they have Jennifer and Andy.”

“Andy? Who’s Andy?”

“I’ll explain in the car. I tried checking his phone for numbers, but it was broken in the crash. We can’t waste any time. We have to find them before midnight tomorrow.”

“I don’t mean to rain on your parade,” Ortiz said. “But that could be a problem unless you got a map with an
X
on it. Ciudad de Almas is almost as big as Playa Azul.”

Ignoring him, Vargas said to Beth, “What happens at midnight?”

Despite the heat, she shivered, pulling the blanket close. “That’s when the cleansing begins. A cleansing by fire.”

88

O
RTIZ HADN’T BEEN
lying about needing a map with an
X
on it.

Once a small fishing village off the Sea of Cortez, Ciudad de Almas had at least quadrupled in size over the decades, taking up a long stretch of coastline.

The city was a mix of old and new: retro adobe buildings nestled between modern business offices and tourist shops.

But what stood out were the cliffs that overlooked the place like all-seeing, all-knowing gods.

The sun was up well before they arrived. The drive had been long—Ortiz refusing to relinquish the wheel—so Vargas and Beth had slept in the backseat, arms intertwined.

When they pulled into town, the Día de los Muertos festival had begun in earnest. Everywhere you turned, there was celebration: a street parade full of papier-mâché skulls, mariachi bands, dancing children with painted faces, tourists and locals wearing skull masks, all under the watchful eye of the local
policía.
 

It was, for the most part, a harmless exercise in tradition, a joyous occasion for everyone involved. But somewhere in town, that
X
was marked, and the lives of a woman and her son depended on them finding it.

While Vargas bought Beth a pair of jeans and a Day of the Dead T-shirt and waited for her to dress under the blanket in the car, Ortiz tracked down a local map.

None of them were hungry, but they knew they needed something to give them energy, so they found a small café, ordered espressos and Mexican pastries, and unfolded the map in front of them.

“Here’s the listing of landmarks,” Beth said, then ran her finger down the page.

There was a fierceness to her demeanor that Vargas hadn’t seen before. A clarity of purpose.

He couldn’t be sure, of course—he was no expert—but he sensed that after last night’s violence she had turned some kind of corner, and had seen the last of her headaches.

Her refusal to visit a doctor hadn’t surprised Vargas. Despite the emotional seesaw she’d been riding, she was a strong, stubborn woman, as determined as she was beautiful.

“Here it is,” she said. “
Iglesia del Sagrado Corazón
. Church of the Sacred Heart.”

“You realize,” Vargas told her, “there’s no guarantee this priest will know anything.”

Ortiz cut in before Beth could respond. “Like you said last night. It’s the only thing we’ve got.”

“He knows something,” Beth said. She had a faraway look in her eyes. Had gone inward for a moment.

“How can you be sure?”

She focused on Vargas now. “There’s something about this place that speaks to me, Nick. Rafael said it was my home for a while, and I definitely feel like I’ve been here before.”

“You’re starting to remember?”

She shook her head. “Not exactly. It’s like what I told you about the whole Andy thing—I see these dark shapes, and I’m just waiting for them to surface.”

Vargas had been thrown by the Andy/Angie revelation. There had never been any indication that a child was involved in this, but each new day Vargas spent with this story seemed to bring a fresh new surprise.

“And the priest is one of those shapes?”

“He’d have to be, wouldn’t he? The nuns in that house didn’t just happen to bump into me on the road. Whatever we were up to, we were in it together and the priest knows about it. I’m sure he does.”

“How far is the church?” Vargas asked.

Ortiz was measuring the distance with his fingers. “Not far,” he said. “We could drive, but with everything going on around here, we might be better off on foot.”

Vargas looked at Beth. “You up to walking?”

She shot him a look. “I just killed a man with two hands and a piece of rope, Nick. I think I can manage to walk a few blocks.”

“Easy, kiddo, I’m not the enemy.”

She softened. “I’m sorry. I’m just worried about Jen and Andy.”

She stood up, a bundle of adrenaline. She hadn’t touched her espresso
or
her pastry.

“I can’t sit here anymore. Let’s do it.”

89

T
HEY HAD TO
dodge the parade and an outdoor food fair to get to the church.

With each new block, they drew closer to the cliffs, as the buildings and houses and roads grew more and more decrepit, reflecting an even older Mexico that hadn’t kept up with the times.

There wasn’t much celebrating going on in this part of town. Some of the houses had makeshift altars in their windows, with burning candles, offerings of fruit, and photos of their dead loved ones. But most of the houses were silent and empty.

After a while, they came to a short dirt road with a battered sign that read:
IGLESIA DEL SAGRADO CORAZÓN
. At the end of the road stood a large, rustic adobe structure with a leaning bell tower that looked as if it might topple at any moment.

Church of the Sacred Heart.

They stood at the mouth of the road, gaping at it.

“You sure this is the right one?” Vargas asked.

Ortiz checked his map. “This is it,
pocho.
”

“Maybe there’s more than one Church of the Sacred—”

“La iglesia está cerrada,”
a voice said.

They turned to find an old woman on a bicycle staring at them from across the street. A plastic sack full of
conchas
—Mexican sweet breads—hung from the handlebars.

“La iglesia está cerrada,”
she repeated.
The church is closed
.

Vargas asked her for how long.

“Many weeks,” she said in Spanish. “After Father Gerard left.”

Ortiz’s eyebrows went up. “The priest is gone?”

“Yes,” the woman said. “One day the police came to speak to him; the next day, no more Gerard.”

Ortiz and Vargas exchanged looks and Vargas turned to translate for Beth.

But Beth wasn’t paying any attention to them, her gaze fixed on the church.

“Go home,” the old woman said. “There is nothing to see here.”

Then she turned her bike around and rode away, the sack of
conchas
swinging from the handlebars.

Ortiz watched her. “That was weird.”

Vargas nodded. “She came all the way out here with those sweet breads. I wonder who they were for.”

Ortiz shrugged. “Maybe she was selling them.”

Vargas turned to Beth again, but she was still staring at the church. Seemed transfixed.

“We need to come up with another game plan,” he told her. “The old woman says the priest is gone.”

“I know this place,” Beth said, then started up the road toward it.

B
ETH APPROACHED THE
entrance to the church, a jumble of half-memories swirling through her mind, trying to break through.

She
did
know this place. She was sure she’d been here before.

Moving up to the double doors, she ran a hand across their warped wooden surface.

It felt familiar to her.

There was a chain and padlock on the door handles, but when Beth pulled on the lock it sprang free in her hand. It hadn’t been fastened properly.

Unwinding the chain, she dropped it aside and pushed the doors open, the old hinges groaning.

Inside was a cavernous room with at least a dozen rows of pews, all facing an altar that featured a larger than life-size figure of Jesus on the cross. Sunlight slanted in from a skylight above and through stained-glass windows high along each side.

Beth had never been religious, but as she moved down the aisle there was no denying the power here. The feeling that you were in the presence of something larger than you. Greater.

She stopped in front of the altar, stared up at the watchful eyes of Christ.

“Beth, what is it?”

She turned. Vargas and Ortiz were standing in the doorway.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “There’s something about this place. I—”

She heard a shuffling sound from above and stopped herself, shifting her gaze to the balcony over the doorway.

To her surprise, a boy stood near the rail, staring down at her. Wide-eyed.

He couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old, a Mexican child wearing only a dark pair of pants. There were burn scars on the right side of his neck and down his arm.

He stared at Beth intently, then broke into a smile. “Elizabeth?”

Startled by the sound of her name, Beth stepped backward. The boy suddenly turned and ran, disappearing from sight, his footsteps clattering on the stairs.

And as Vargas and Ortiz stepped inside to see what the commotion was, the boy emerged at a full sprint and shot past them, coming straight toward Beth—the smile even wider now, a smile of joy as he threw his arms around her and hugged her.

“You came back for us,” he said. “I tell the others you would, but they don’t believe.”

He squeezed her tighter.

“You came back, Elizabeth. You came back.”

90

T
HE BOY’S NAME
was Cristo.

He seemed hurt when Beth couldn’t remember it.

They were sitting in a pew now, and he was holding her hands, not wanting to let them go.

Vargas and Ortiz sat several pews away, watching and listening, giving them room.

“Someone hurt me,” Beth told the boy, then bent forward and showed him the scar on her scalp. “Some bad people did this to me and it makes me forget sometimes.”

She looked at the burn marks on his neck and arm and knew that he was no stranger to bad people himself. That feeling of anger she’d felt in the car with Rafael threatened to overcome her again.

“What do you forget?” Cristo asked.

“All kinds of things. Names, places. Like this place. I think I’ve been here before, but I’m not sure.”

“Sí,”
he said. “You come here many times. But how do you forget about me?”

Beth’s heart was breaking.

“I’m sorry, Cristo.” She touched her chest. “I can feel you here…” Then her head. “But I can’t find you in here.”

He looked confused. “Is this why you don’t come back for so long? Because you cannot find us?”