The Mexico Run (8 page)

    During those brief minutes the door had been open I had looked past the desk at an open, unbarred window and noticed a stretch of bare desert. I already had guessed that I was not in jail in Tijuana. They must have taken me to some obscure spot out in the desert to bury me. I guessed maybe he was telling the truth about not having a phone.

    The tray held a large bowl of beans and chili, an unlabeled brown bottle, which to my amazement was filled with slightly warm beer, and a half-dozen paper napkins with a floral pattern. I didn't have to guess what they were intended for.

    The chili was very good, and I cleaned the bowl. Even the dried up tacos on the tray tasted all right.

    After I had eaten, I hit the enamel pail in the corner of the room. I was feeling a lot better, almost good enough to start worrying.

    I figured sooner or later someone was bound to show up. I didn't know what it was all about, and I couldn't even guess. They hadn't booked me in the jail in Tijuana, so I figured they weren't going to book me at all. And it didn't make sense just to hold me indefinitely in some obscure country jailhouse.

    The only thing I could think of was that they'd keep me a few days and then take me over to the border and dump me. They had my money, they probably had the Jag, which would be easy enough to peddle below the border. Even if I were freed, there wasn't a damn thing I would be able to do about it. They would be smart enough to know that. They probably just didn't want me to be kicking around Tijuana.

    So I waited. But by the time it began to get dark, I got tired of waiting. I started to bang on the steel door and when my bruised fist told me that whatever sounds were coming through on the other side wouldn't be loud enough to wake up the Indian, I picked up the water pail and used that. I had already used the water to wash with.

    It got action after a few minutes.

    This time the jailer was alone when he opened the door, and instead of looking sad, he looked mad. He was yawning, and I guess I had interrupted his siesta. He stepped back after kicking the door open, and he kept one hand on the gun at his right hip.

    
"Un abacado,"
I said.
"Puedo acupar un abacado? Pronto!"

    He shook his head. Next to shrugging, it was his favorite gesture.

    
"Mariana,"
he said.
"Mariana. Si?"

    He nodded his head and then slammed the door and shot the bar home.

    Darkness came, but no more tray. I guessed they served only one meal a day. I was lucky at that. Prisoners in Mexican jails must pay for their own food, and at the moment I was not exactly in the chips.

    That night I slept badly. The nightmares were back, and this time there was no Sharon to wake me up and snap me out of them.

    He arrived the next morning, sometime before noon. He was about the last person I expected to see.

    The comic cop with the bandoliers hadn't been lying when he said,
manana.
It was the first time I had ever heard a Mexican use the expression and mean it literally.

    About the time I was getting ready to bang on the-door again with the metal bucket, I heard the bar being drawn back, and the door was opened. He wasn't wearing his bandoliers or his guns, and I guessed at once it was because he didn't think he would-need them. He beckoned with a nod of his head, and I walked into the office. He pointed to the desk. On top of it was my wallet, the keys to the Jaguar, the safety-deposit box key I had obtained from the bank two days ago. There was also a clean sports shirt which I remembered packing in San Francisco before I left.

    I stripped out of the bloody one I was wearing, and put the fresh shirt on. I picked up the wallet and rifled through the sheaf of bills. I almost fainted when I found the two five-hundred-dollar notes. I didn't count the rest of it, but it seemed intact.

    My jailer stood by, a dreamy look on his face as I pocketed the wallet. He twisted his head, indicating I was to follow him.

    For a second, as I stepped outside of the small, one-storied jail, the bright sunlight almost blinded me. There was a small, foreign sedan on the dusty street in front of the jail, and a man sat at the wheel. The door opposite him was open and he made a motion toward it with his head.

    It wasn't until I rounded the car and sat next to him that I recognized Captain Morales.

    He was looking at me sympathetically, half shaking his head and making odd little cooing sounds.

    "A most unfortunate occurrence, Senor Johns," he said. "A mistake. A sad mistake. I would have come sooner, but I only learned about it when you failed to answer your phone and I stopped by your hotel. Unfortunately, the little senorita was so upset, it took some time for me to find out where they had taken you."

    His voice was utterly sincere, and I think I might really have believed him if it wasn't for what he said next.

    "But in a way, it all worked out for the best. It gave me the opportunity to check up on you and to verify your background. It also gave me a chance to check back on those fingerprints on Bongo's letter."

    I guess I should have played along, thanked him for coming to my rescue. I couldn't do it. I was thinking, you son-of-a-bitch, you framed the whole thing. You wanted time all right to check up. But you also wanted to give me a little object lesson in just how tough you are and how much power you can wield when you want to.

    "The girl is all right?" I asked. "She has gone back across the border?"

    He started the engine of the car.

    "Why no, senor," he said. "I didn't know you wanted her to go back."

    "Then she is still at the El Camino?"

    "She will be there-when we return," he said. "In her condition, after what happened, I was sure you wouldn't have wanted me to leave her there by herself. I was only too happy to take care of her while I waited to find you, senor. I am sure that is what you would have wished me to do."

    I changed the subject.

    "And you have satisfied yourself concerning my background?"

    He nodded.

    "I have already started the ball rolling. We will return to the El Camino and you can pick up your car and go on down to Ensenada as you planned. There will be a man there who will talk to you. One other thing. I think it would be very wise if you kept the senorita with you. After all, a man traveling around alone, with no particular business-suspicious-bound to arouse curiosity. But with a beautiful young girl. Ah, that is understood. You understand?"

    I understood all right.

    "And it will give me added pleasure to have her company when I come down to see you."

    I was wondering if it was going to give Sharon added pleasure.

    I didn't like it. Didn't like it at all. But I said nothing. I knew, however, that sooner or later I was going to have trouble with Captain Hernando Morales.

    

    

    By the time I finally wheeled the Jaguar through the sordid shanty-suburb on the outskirts of Tijuana, heading south on Mexican Route 2 for the slightly over one-hundred-kilometer trip to Ensenada, it was well past noon, and it was hot. I was tempted to take the toll road, which would have saved several miles and which had not been completed the last time I had been in Mexico. But I stuck to the old, winding highway bordering the ocean, as I wanted to once again familiarize myself with it. This was the road I would be using during the next weeks and months.

    The faint offshore breeze from the craggy range of hills failed to dissipate the torrid summer heat, and I drove with the top folded back despite the blistering sun. The" sound of the tires on the hot, asphalt pavement combined with the wind whistling by made conversation impossible, and this was the way I wanted it.

    I was thinking about Angel Cortillo. I had talked to him over long distance a few minutes before leaving San Francisco to head south, and I had been tempted to telephone him again before leaving Tijuana. I knew that he had been expecting me to arrive at least forty-eight hours ago, and that he would be wondering what had happened.

    At the last minute I decided not to put the call through. There was the remote possibility that the telephone in my room at the El Camino had been bugged. I could, of course, have made the phone call from a pay booth elsewhere, but with the highly sophisticated electronic devices used today, no telephone conversation from any source is really completely safe. A man can stand five hundred yards away from a telephone booth and be able to overhear a conversation without even tapping the line.

    Of course, I doubted very much that Captain Morales would go to this trouble, but on the other hand I thought it just as well that he know nothing of my relationship with the commercial fishermen I would be meeting in Ensenada. Angel would be wondering what happened to me, but there was really no point in calling him before I arrived. Late or not, I would still find him there.

    I have known Angel Cortillo for more than fifteen years. We first met in the small Texas town where I was born and brought up. We were in high school together. Angel's father was a wet-back who had waded across the Rio Grande to take up illegal residence in Texas, where he opened a chili parlor and brought up his nine orphaned children. Angel and I had been close friends all through high school, played together on the football team and double-dated. After high school, he had gone back to Mexico and finally settled in Baja California.

    We had kept in touch with each other throughout the years, and although it had been more than half a decade since I had last seen him, I was confident that he had changed but little from the boy I had known in my youth. Short, stocky, intelligent, with a ready and attractive wit, Angel Cortillo was ambitious and hard working. He had written me while I was in Vietnam, telling me that he had saved his money and had purchased a commercial fishing boat and was making a fair living.

    When I'd talked to him from San Francisco, I had given no hint of what was really on my mind, but had merely explained that I would be driving south for a brief vacation and would look him up. He had received the news with his usual exuberant enthusiasm, expressing pleasure at the idea of our seeing each other again after so many years.

    
"Amigo,"
he had said, speaking with that precise accent he had picked up in the States, tinctured with a Texas drawl,
"Amigo,
we shall paint the town. I will have the tequila standing by and shall personally prepare the en-chilladas and tacos. And girls, plenty of girls. You have chosen a beautiful time to pay me a visit. Business is lousy, and so my time will be at your disposal. We will celebrate."

    I knew that he had not changed. Angel loved cooking hot Mexican dishes, and he loved his tequila. And there were always the girls. Despite his short, truncated, heavy body, his ugly, pock-marked face, Angel Cortillo had never had difficulty finding girls. No, I didn't believe that Angel would have changed over the years. But I wondered how much I had changed.

    One thing was certain. I was no longer the same person that Angel had known back in that small Texas town, some fifteen years ago.

    I would be seeing Angel within the next few hours, and so I stopped thinking about him and started thinking of that other man that I would be meeting in Ensenada, a man about whom I knew absolutely nothing. A man who would be contacting me at the small, isolated seaside motel some six miles south of the Ensenada city line on the Pacific coast. The motel had been recommended to me by Captain Morales, and he had telephoned ahead to make a reservation for "my friend Senor Johns and his wife."

    It was just after four o'clock when I pulled into the outskirts of Ensenada, and had Sharon not been with me, I would have driven down to the waterfront and looked up Angel Cortillo immediately. However, I was not anxious to have Sharon know anything more than necessary about my business, and so I drove directly through the town, which had changed virtually not at all since the last time I had been there, and headed south.

    I passed between rows of broken-down shacks and discarded, skeletonized, old cars, carefully avoiding the deep ruts. After several miles I came to a fork and took the right hand road which was hardly more than a cow-path. There was a weather-beaten sign at the fork, with an arrow pointing to the right, underneath which was the badly hand-lettered sign La Casa Pacifica.

    A half mile further on, I dipped into an
arroyo
and then climbed a short hill. When I reached the top, I was looking down at the Pacific.

    A hundred yards ahead to the right, just over the hill, was a low, rambling adobe building with a red tile roof. It was surrounded on three sides by a white stucco, six-foot-high wall, and beyond the roof line on the far side lay the ocean, its turbulent waves washing the rocky shore some two hundred feet straight down from where La Casa Pacifica tottered at the edge of the cliff.

    I drove through the opened gates in the center of the white wall, passing beneath an overhead arch on which were the words: La Casa Pacifica. The large patio inside of the walls was unpaved, and two saddled horses, reins hanging over their heads to the ground, stood patiently in the shade of a group of tall, windblown palm trees. Off to the other side was an ancient pickup truck, with its front left wheel resting on a jack and the tire removed. Next to it was a Buick sedan with crumpled fenders, a dented top, dust-covered but apparently still serviceable. The words La Casa Pacifica were barely discernable on the right-hand front door.

    I pulled up to face the iron-studded, double doors leading into the lodge, stopping next to the jacked-up pickup truck. There was no one in sight. A sign in English at the side of the double doors read:
Office and Cocktail Lounge.