Sufficient Ransom (11 page)

As if her own safety mattered when her child was missing.

Walking on, Ann noticed that there were more people on the streets than there had been in the morning. Groups of men, mostly, had gathered on the street corners. A surprising number of them wore black shirts and jackets stamped with images of Santa Muerte, Mexico’s patron saint of drug dealers, the dispossessed, and the dead. She had once read about the saint in a newspaper article. She recalled being struck by the notion that people could revere something so ghastly.

Moving past the growing crowds, Ann wondered if there would be more street fighting. It seemed that there was a lot of it these days in Tijuana. The images of Santa Muerte made her think of Max Ruiz again. The Ruiz family apparently had connections to the narcotics trade. She had read that kidnapping was part of the drug business, one of the many weapons rival cartels used to fight each other.

Ann had a vague feeling that she was becoming obsessed with Max Ruiz. She imagined him running a factory at the top of a shantytown whose residents were supplementing their meager incomes with drug money. The money earned in the narcotics trade, she surmised, not only provided a living to its participants, it supported those who were not active in the business by virtue of being circulated back into society. She imagined that the Mexican government was having such a hard time eradicating the cartels because a large part of its citizenry was benefiting from their lucrative, though illegal and deadly efforts.

Realizing that making a nuisance out of herself was the only way she could get anyone to pay any attention to her, Ann started shoving Travis and Kika’s pictures in front of pedestrians in this new area she found
herself in: the Zona Norte. She had deduced the area’s name from some signs. A policeman, one of many who seemed to have suddenly appeared in the streets, stopped and asked what she was doing.

The policeman’s presence kindled Ann’s cynical thoughts.
Everyone knows the Mexican police collude with the cartels. Drug dealers assassinated Max Ruiz’s uncle. Maybe this guy could take me to the Ruiz family
. “Please,” she said to the policeman. “I’m trying to find Max Ruiz. You must have heard of him. He’s a big businessman. His uncle was killed a while back, here in Tijuana.”

The policeman was an older man with a brown weathered face. He shook his head. “Don’t make me arrest you, Señora. Go back to America. There’s nothing for you here.”

Fearful the officer would make good on his threat to arrest her, Ann hurried away. Her mind kept pace with her legs; past the thickening crowds in the street, past the leering faces of idle men. Her husband, Señor Sanz, the bar man, the police officer, had all said it: go home, go home. Could they be right? Was she really on a wild goose chase? She shook her head to try to clear the fog.

Blocks from the growing crowds, Ann stopped in front of an empty lot to catch her breath and get her bearings. Even after the soda, her mouth felt like cotton, her head a heavy lead ball. The sick feeling in the pit of her stomach had become more acute. All of her efforts to find Kika Garcia and her son had come to nothing. She couldn’t bear the thought of returning to San Diego without any leads.

Ann noticed a boy of about eleven or twelve on the sidewalk down a ways kicking discarded boxes into the street. The boy’s blue jeans were slick with dirt. His gray shirt was torn at the neck and stained all over. The boy kept looking at her and away again, as if he were trying to get up the courage to talk to her. She had read about the cartels’ use of homeless boys. There were supposedly many of them in Tijuana—addicts and dropouts—to sell drugs, run errands, and at times, to even murder for their adopted families, these powerful criminal organizations that controlled the city and half the country.

This boy could very well be one of those bad kids. Then again, he looked more sad than criminal. Ann wondered if maybe he could help her get to Max Ruiz. Jamming her fists into her pockets to steady her nerves, she approached the boy. The closer she got to the child, the more he kicked at the garbage. Ten feet away, she stopped. She remembered that boys were always hungry. This one certainly looked like he could use some food.

“You know where I can get some food around here?” she called out in English, signaling with her hands what she meant.

When the boy turned to look at her, Ann was shocked to see that he had a long scar down the side of his face. His dark eyes were defiant and sad. She repeated her question. The boy’s face brightened a shade but still, he hesitated. He jerked his head to the left, indicating that she should follow him. “Show me,” she said.

The boy’s pace quickened as he led her away from the main thoroughfare toward what appeared to be a more industrial area. He kept looking back to see if she was still behind him. Ann glimpsed buildings riddled with small holes and broken windows. Despite the sinister surroundings, she was glad to be away from the bustle of the growing crowds. The grim faces of the loitering men had spooked her. The boy crossed a street and stopped. He gave her a pointed look, as if to say,
down here
.

From the opposite corner, Ann peered down the narrow way where the boy wanted her to go, expecting to see a restaurant. Her heart jumped. A hundred feet away, a huge skeletal face partially obscured by a thick hood of paint gleamed in the late afternoon sun.
Santa Muerte
. Painted in broad black and white strokes, the saint’s one visible eye socket stared out from the front of a sprawling warehouse. Santa Muerte held a stiff scythe in one bony fist, a globe in the other. Her formidable presence alerted Ann, for the first time, to the graffiti that covered the nearby buildings and sidewalks.

The boy waved his hand, indicating that Ann should follow him. Remembering the beggar that morning, she turned and quickly retraced
her steps. There was no way she was going down there. A gang of kids could be waiting to slit her throat. She wasn’t about to tempt fate a second time.

As she hurried away, a plan began to take shape in Ann’s mind. Her nemesis, the artist Chuck Blackmart, lived in Tijuana. He sold his own work and that of fellow artists out of his gallery here in the city. Blackmart had a reputation for hobnobbing with others who, like himself, were rich and famous. Living in Tijuana, he probably knew the local players. Though they had never actually met in person, they had talked on the phone once. Once he heard that her son was missing, the artist might be willing to help her.

Her heart sinking, Ann remembered that Blackmart had accused her of encouraging Nora March to dump his work—several of his early pieces that Nora’s late husband had purchased—in order to harm his reputation. The truth was Nora hated Blackmart’s work so much she didn’t need any encouragement from Ann. When Ann tried to explain that she had nothing to do with Nora’s decisions, Blackmart had switched gears and accused her of belittling his work to the auction house staff that handled the sale of the collection. Untrue of course. But she had trashed his work on her blog. And here she was thinking of seeking Blackmart’s help in the hopes he would forget their past.

She would do anything to bring her son home, even beg Blackmart’s forgiveness.

Several blocks from the gathering crowds that had frightened her earlier, Ann stopped in front of what appeared to be a closed auto body shop. She pulled her phone out and turned it on, hoping for a connection so that she could look up the address to Blackmart’s gallery. Thankfully her phone was cooperating. After a few minutes of searching, she found the address and plugged it into Google Maps. The gallery appeared to be located southeast of Avenida Revolución, an area she was now fairly familiar with, having spent a good portion of the afternoon there. She figured that as long as she avoided the crowds in that vicinity she would be fine.

Heading east, Ann glanced over her shoulder to see if the boy was following her. There was no sign of him. Despite her annoyance at the child’s obvious attempt to ambush her, she felt sorry for him. A street kid, he probably had no family and no one to teach him that his young life was precious.

A precious life
. She remembered when Travis was small. The wonder of him. His delicate fingers, soft ears, and his buttery skin. His eyes taking in the world in that serious way that was uniquely his.
Please be safe, Travis
.

6:30 P.M
.

F
inding the Blackmart Gallery was proving to be difficult. Street signs were few and far between. The phone map had led Ann away from the main roads into a maze of smaller ones. When the occasional sign she did come across didn’t match the map, she walked on a ways hoping that she was off by a street or two. Ann finally stopped by a small fenced-in field to get her bearings and to rest. She wished she had someone to talk to. She considered calling Richard but quickly put that idea aside. Her husband had made it more than clear he didn’t support her choice to come to Tijuana.

She lowered herself to the pavement, her back to the fence. For the first time in her life, Ann felt like praying. She remembered when she was twelve-years-old. Her mother had moved all of her clothes out of the house the week before. It was just Ann and her dad, alone in that big house by the river. Her father was rarely home for dinner. And when he was around, he would sit in the family room and stare at the muted television, a bottomless whiskey at his side. When she tried to talk to her father, he would answer in one-word sentences, his eyes forever glued to the television screen.

Ann’s best friend, Christy Balen, the daughter of devout Christians, would often have Ann over to her house after school. The Balen home was everything Ann’s was not. Mrs. Balen was home every afternoon helping her three children with their homework. She never missed any of Christy’s dance or piano recitals. The Balen children were never scolded or made to feel inadequate.

One night Mrs. Balen had prepared Ann’s favorite meal of cheesy lasagna, buttered corn, and chocolate milk. Ann felt awkward when Christy, her siblings, and their parents had bowed their heads over the family’s special pre-dinner prayer. Ann didn’t know the prayer so she mumbled a few incoherent phrases. Looking up, she saw that Mrs. Balen’s smile was gently reassuring. When her father came to pick her up later that evening, Ann had cried. The thought of leaving the warmth
of her friend’s home for the emptiness of her own had filled her with a bewildering loneliness.

The following week, Ann accepted Mrs. Balen’s invitation to join her family at church. Ann had had little exposure to religion; she had been to church only once before. On Christmas Eve of the prior year, the local Episcopalian choir had performed the Christmas program. One of the Olsons’ neighbors had been talking up the experience to Ann’s mother for years. Ann’s mother finally relented, not because she was religious—she was not—but because she thought that hearing Christmas carols in church would be a quaint experience for herself and her young daughter. Ann’s father had declined to come.

The chanting and the music that evening had filled Ann with a sort of awed hope and a feeling of belonging, the likes of which she had never before experienced. At the end of the evening, the softly falling snow mingled with Ann’s tears as she and her mother, their heads down against the wind, made their way across the white parking lot.

But Ann’s visit to church with the Balen family did not go well. Though she was only twelve, she couldn’t help but feel that the preacher was talking down to his congregation. She didn’t appreciate a stranger telling her she had to make right choices or the Lord would be disappointed in her. “If you don’t know what to do, consult the Bible,” the pastor had said. Ann remembered thinking,
why should I turn off my mind and accept what you or the bible say?
When Mrs. Balen invited Ann to church a second time she politely declined. After her disappointing experience the first time she had decided she was pretty much done with the whole subject of God.

A few weeks later, when Christy asked if Ann had heard about the little boy in the next town who was killed, Ann admitted she had heard the story. It was all over the news. The poor child’s parents had beaten him to death with a “Biblical rod.” Ann remembered feeling two distinct emotions: horror that parents could do that to their own child, and relief that her own family was not religious. God, the parents had told police when they were arrested, had told them to punish their child to instill in
him a proper fear of the Lord. Ann recalled the worry in Christy’s face, her hushed tone, when she talked about it. Ann remembered thinking that her friend was probably afraid to talk to her own parents about the tragedy because
they
were really into God.

Ann shut the door on her memories. It was getting late, and she had to find the Blackmart Gallery. The phone map in hand, she stood up and resumed walking. A few minutes later, the screen on the device went suddenly blank. The battery had died. She was lost without the map. The sun had dipped below the quiet street, revealing the long shadows of evening. Like the day, the hope in Ann’s heart was dying. Searching for her son had turned up absolutely nothing. And now she was pinning her hopes on a stranger whose work she had publicly ridiculed. What was she thinking?

Ann heard what sounded like a gunshot. Glancing around nervously, she wondered how she would find her way out of this maze of empty streets. It was almost dark. It seemed like hours since she had seen anyone go by. But she knew that they were out there. Their shouts, the popping sounds, and the wail of sirens in the distance, gave them away. The darker it got, the closer the noise seemed to get, until Ann felt she could barely breathe for the fear pounding in her chest.

She pictured Richard in their house, worried sick about her and their only child. Would he ever forgive her this madness? The familiar need for purposeful action slowly kindled inside of Ann. She knew she had to move or she would be caught in this web of darkness—an American woman alone in one of the most dangerous cities in the world.