Rosarito Beach (21 page)

K
ay knew that within a couple of hours, every law-enforcement agency in California was going to be looking for her car. In fifteen minutes, however, she'd be out of her car and in the “beaner” minivan waiting on North River Road, then she'd head south and take Tito across the border. That is, she'd be in the minivan if she followed Mora's plan—and she had no intention of following Mora's plan.

Mora had needed Kay to get Tito out of Camp Pendleton, but once Tito was out, Mora wouldn't need her. So although Mora may have been telling the truth about letting her take Tito across the border to exchange him for Jessica, Kay thought it more likely he was lying. What he'd probably do was have the minivan driver—the guy with the cowboy hat—try to kill her, and then who knows what might happen to Jessica: a whorehouse or a grave? It also occurred to Kay that the real reason Mora wanted her to meet the minivan on North River Road was that it was so dark and isolated, and thus a better spot for the driver to ambush her.

So Kay had a little surprise for Mora and Tito. The object she'd placed in the pocket in the driver's-side door was a Taser. At the right moment, she'd reach down, pull up the Taser, and shoot across her lap. Then she'd zap the son of a bitch until he was unconscious and dump him in the trunk.

After that, she'd swap her license plates with plates from some parked car. And then she would call Mora. She'd tell him that if he wanted Tito back, they'd make the exchange in the U.S. and Kay would pick the spot. If Mora threatened to hurt Jessica, she'd threaten to hurt Tito. If Mora threatened to kill Jessica, she'd threaten to kill Tito. She was going to force Mora to bring her daughter across the border and make the exchange in some place and in some manner where she and Jessica might both survive.

Tito, sitting next to her, still wearing the blond wig and the blond mustache, interrupted her thoughts. “Drive faster,” he said.

“No,” she said. “The van is only a few miles away, and it's going to be at least two hours before they know you've escaped. We don't need to get stopped by a cop for speeding.”

“Huh,” Tito said, which Kay took for his agreement.

“Where's your gun?” he asked next.

She wished he'd just shut up so she could think.

“It's in the trunk. I couldn't take it into the brig, so I left it there.” Actually, her gun was on the floor of the car, beneath the front seat.

It was time to put Tito in the trunk. She reached down with her left hand for the Taser . . .

And that's when God laughed.

Coming toward Kay's car was another car, and for some reason the idiot driving had his brights on and they were blinding her. Then the other car swerved into her lane and was coming directly at her.

Kay reacted without thinking and did the only thing she could do: She cranked the steering wheel hard to the right to avoid a head-on collision—and sent her car into a drainage ditch. Kay and Tito both screamed as the car flipped over onto its roof.

Kay didn't move immediately, but it didn't feel like anything was broken and she didn't seem to be bleeding. She did a physical inventory, moving fingers, arms, legs, and neck. Everything seemed functional. The seat belt and air bag had apparently worked as advertised. She looked over at Tito; like her, he was upside down—but he wasn't moving and his head was at an odd angle. Oh, shit. Then it registered in her mind that there was no air bag deployed around him, and no seat belt holding him in place. Kay's 2004 Camry sounded an alarm when you started the car to tell you the seat belts were unfastened, but it stopped after about ten seconds, figuring it had given you enough warning. And with her mind focused only on escaping from Pendleton, she hadn't even noticed he wasn't wearing his seat belt. She had no idea why the air bag didn't deploy, but considering the age of the car, maybe that wasn't a mystery, either.

Before she could free herself from the overturned car, someone rapped on the driver's-side window. It was a young guy, maybe twenty, dressed in civilian clothes, but he had a short military-style haircut and Kay guessed he was a marine stationed at Pendleton.

He was screaming, “Are you okay? Are you okay?”

Kay nodded.

The guy tried to open her door, but it was stuck. A moment later, he came back with a tire iron and yelled, “Close your eyes.” He broke the window, cleared away the glass, reached inside, and cut Kay's seat belt with a jackknife. When he leaned over her, she could smell the beer on his breath. “I got you,” he said as he pulled her from the vehicle, but she was thinking,
I was almost killed by a fuckin' drunken marine.

As the one marine was dragging Kay out of the car, his buddy—another young guy with a boot camp haircut—was on the other side of the car. He didn't have to break the window to get at Tito; the passenger-side door opened and Tito fell out of the car. The marine looked down at Tito, then knelt down and touched his throat. “Oh, God,” he said. “Ken, I think this guy's dead.”

Kay ran around to Tito's side of the car and, like the marine, knelt down next to Tito and felt for a pulse in his throat. There was no pulse. Tito was dead.

But Tito couldn't be dead.

“He's alive,” Kay said. “He's just unconscious. Is your car okay to drive?” she said to the marine named Ken.

“Yeah.”

“Then carry him over to your car and put him on the backseat.”

The other marine said, “I'm sorry, lady, but I don't think he's alive. And if he is alive, he shouldn't be moved. His neck looks funny. I'm calling 911.”

The marine speaking was as drunk as his buddy, Ken, and he, too, smelled like the inside of a beer keg and his words were slurred. He reached for his cell phone, fumbled it, dropped it on the ground, and it went under Kay's overturned car. While he was on the ground, trying to locate his phone in the dark, Kay ran to the driver's side of her car and groped for her gun. She found it, and just as the marine started to punch numbers into his cell phone, she pointed the gun at him and said, “Give me the phone.”

“Jesus, lady, are you nuts?” the young marine said.

“Yeah, I am nuts. You have no idea what's at stake here. So you and your buddy pick him up and put him in your car like I told you.” Then she added, “And be careful with him.”

The marines looked at each other, not sure what to do.

Kay said, “Guys, I'm not screwing around here. You don't do what I tell you, I'll shoot you both.”

The marines picked up Tito, and while they were carrying him over to Ken's car, the other marine said, “I'm telling you, lady, this guy's dead. I've seen a lot of dead guys.”

“He's not dead!” Kay said. “And if he is, you and your buddy are guilty of vehicular homicide. You're both shitfaced.”

After they put Tito down on the backseat of Ken's car, Kay said, “Now give me your car keys.”

“Hey, fuck that,” Ken said—and Kay fired a round that went right between him and the other marine's head.

“Jesus Christ!” Ken screamed.

“Give me the keys,” Kay said.

“Give her the damn keys, Ken,” the other marine said. “She's crazy.”

Ken flipped her his keys, and Kay said, “Now your cell phones. Toss them in the car.”

Still aiming her gun at the marines, Kay moved around to the driver's-side door. As she was moving, she said, “Think about this, Ken. If my friend dies, you go to jail for vehicular homicide like I said. So you could call the cops and tell them I stole your car, and if they catch me, I'll tell them how your drunken ass ran me off the road and how I was just trying to get my friend to a hospital. Choice number two is, you go back to your barracks, sleep until the booze is out of your system, then call the cops and tell them someone stole your car. If you do it my way, I'll ditch your car somewhere close by, you'll get it back in a couple of days, and you won't get in trouble for hurting a guy, maybe crippling him or killing him. Give it some thought.”

Kay knew the two marines were basically good guys, the type inclined to do the right thing even if it meant getting in trouble themselves. She just hoped they wouldn't do the right thing this time.

Kay started Ken's car, planning to drive away, then shut off the engine and got out. The two marines, now thirty yards down the road toward Pendleton, stopped and looked as she returned to the wreck. She reached inside the Camry and grabbed the Taser and the Walgreens bag containing the chemical she'd used on the marshals.

She didn't have a clue what she was going to do next, but the chemical and the Taser were extra weapons. She returned to the marines' car, started the engine, then waved at the guys as she drove past them; Ken gave her the finger. Kay couldn't help but smile and think
Semper Fi.
She stepped on the gas and headed toward the I-5 freeway—away from the minivan waiting for her on North River Road.

Now what in the hell was she going to do?

How was she going to exchange a dead man for her daughter?

—

I
f she had followed Mora's plan and not been in an accident, by now Kay and Tito should have reached the minivan. She wondered how long the minivan driver would wait before he called Mora to tell him that Kay had not shown up.

Mora wouldn't be too worried—or at least not immediately—because he knew that as long as he had Jessica, Kay would contact him. No, Mora wasn't the primary threat at this point. The threat was the law-enforcement agencies who would soon be hunting for her, and who might prevent her from freeing her daughter.

As she drove, Kay tried to figure out how much time she had before the cops began chasing her. The accident had used up twenty minutes; the marshals should be unconscious for another hour and a half. It would take the marines at least an hour to walk back to Pendleton; as drunk as they were, she didn't think they'd run. Hopefully, they'd take Kay's suggestion, go to their barracks, and report Ken's car stolen in the morning and say nothing about Kay and Tito. But she couldn't count on that. If they reported the accident as soon as they reached the base, the highway patrol would start looking for Ken's car and a woman who had fled the scene of an accident within the hour. The worst scenario would be if the marines found a pay phone before they reached the base and started making calls.

So. She had to assume that in less than sixty minutes, every person with a badge in Southern California was going to be on her tail—which meant that she had less than an hour to figure out a way to evade her pursuers.

Then there was the larger problem: Tito was dead, and when Mora discovered this, her daughter would die.

—

K
ay exited I-5 at the town of Carlsbad and pulled off onto a quiet side street to think. She needed a plan. As she stepped out of the car, she glanced at Tito's body lying on the backseat.
You useless son of a bitch.

The first thing she had to do was get a new car. She couldn't keep using Ken's car, because at some point it would be reported stolen. She might be able to steal a car, but only if someone had left the keys in it; one thing the DEA had not taught her was how to hot-wire a car, and she didn't have time to wander around trying to find an unlocked car with the keys conveniently dangling from the ignition. Then she came up with an easier way to steal a car.

Stealing a car, however, wasn't her biggest problem.

How was she going to get Jessica back now that Tito was dead? And even if she could come up with a plan, how could she give herself enough time to execute the plan? It wouldn't be long before the minivan driver called Mora and told him that Kay hadn't arrived with Tito—and when that happened, Mora was going to know that something had gone wrong.

She rested her butt against the hood of Ken's car, closed her eyes, and thought—and came up with a plan, or if not a plan,
half
a plan. Half a plan was the best she could do for the moment. To give herself the time she needed to execute her half-assed plan, she was going to call Raphael Mora and tell him the truth.

Well, almost the truth.

—

K
ay's next stop was at a twenty-four-hour supermarket in Encinitas. Tito was still lying on the backseat, but if anybody walking by saw him, they would most likely think he was just sleeping or a drunk who'd passed out. She ran into the store, to the toothpaste aisle, and found the thickest dental floss they carried. She would have preferred clear monofilament fishing line, but she didn't have time to drive around and find a place that sold fishing equipment at one in the morning.

Back in the car, she drove as fast as she could to Del Mar—meaning five miles over the speed limit. If a cop stopped her, she was screwed. As she was driving, her cell phone rang. She looked at the caller ID and didn't recognize the number, but she figured it was Mora calling. She let the call go to voice mail.

Kay pulled over at an unlighted spot behind a building that looked like a warehouse. She dragged Tito out of the backseat and put him in the front passenger seat, sitting up. It wasn't easy moving his deadweight, and she was sweating by the time she was done. She put the seat belt across Tito's chest to hold him in a sitting position and turned on the dome light in the car
.

She turned Tito's head so it was facing toward the driver's seat and then noticed that his eyes were open. His eyes made him look
dead
. She pushed down on his eyelids and just prayed they'd stay down. Next, she tied the dental floss to his left wrist, looping the floss over the rearview mirror. The floss was pale green, but you could see it in the light provided by the dome light. That wasn't good. She took her cell phone, put it in video mode, and framed the picture. Okay. If she held the phone just right, the dental floss couldn't be seen clearly. She should be able to pull it off.