Rosarito Beach (24 page)

Jessica looked down at the body, at the red-black hole in Carlos's forehead, at the blood seeping out. He was twitching a little—his fingers were twitching. He wasn't dead yet, but he soon would be.

“It's not a game,” Perez said, then he gestured to the Bear, and the Bear grabbed her arm and led her back to her room. She was so shocked by what had just happened that she didn't resist.

—

J
essica sat on the bed and leaned her back against the wall. Her mouth hurt where Perez had slapped her; her lower lip had been cut and it was starting to get puffy. She couldn't believe the way Perez had executed Carlos. It was like he was stepping on a bug. He'd probably show just as much emotion when he killed her.

She'd failed to escape, but maybe something good would come from the attempt. A lot of people had seen her, and they'd seen Perez slap her and drag her back to the house. Maybe one of those people would call the cops—and maybe talk to an honest cop.

And maybe pigs would fly.

The door opened and Perez came into the room, followed by the Bear and a woman. Jessica realized it was the woman she had seen in the kitchen feeding the baby. She also realized it was the same woman who had injected her with the knockout drug when she was kidnapped.

Perez said something in Spanish and the Bear lunged forward, jerked her off the bed, and then wrapped his big arms around her. He stunk to high heaven, as if he hadn't bathed in days, and she could feel his big, soft gut pressed up against her back. He was so strong she couldn't move her arms at all.

The woman stepped forward. She had a hypodermic in her hand, and she plunged the needle hard into Jessica's upper left arm. She just jammed it in.

“Because of your foolishness,” Perez said in English, “we have to move you.”

A minute later, Jessica's world faded to black.

K
ay arrived at the border at five a.m., as she'd planned, but decided not to cross immediately. She wanted more time to elapse since Tito's escape from the brig, and she wanted more people crossing. At six a.m., she joined the queue of cars crossing into Mexico. Six was also good because it was about the time the border security personnel changed shifts, the day shift replacing the graveyard shift, and a shift change often resulted in people milling around talking to their replacements and not being where they were supposed to be.

Crossing into Mexico was normally easy. The Mexicans
wanted
Americans and their money in Mexico, and the Mexican border guards barely glanced at the IDs; they would have allowed a guy with
TERRORIST
tattooed on his forehead to cross. As far as Kay could tell, the Mexican guards appeared to be behaving as usual, and cars were moving south at the usual rate of speed. This time, however, Kay could see uniformed men walking up the lanes of traffic moving toward Mexico. The men were California Highway Patrol officers—and they were looking at the license plates and into the windows of the cars heading south.

Kay had her long blond hair tucked up under one of the baseball caps she'd found in Surfer Rodney's car, and she was wearing sunglasses with large frames. That was the best she could do for a disguise. If anyone asked to see her ID—which the Mexican border guards would do—she'd show her Miami credentials made out in the name of Elle McDonald. She didn't want there to be a record of Kay Hamilton crossing into Mexico.

Kay figured she had three things working in her favor. If the cops were looking for a particular car, it would be the marine's car, which she'd ditched in Del Mar, and not Rodney's. They would also be expecting Kay to be accompanied by a blond-haired, blue-eyed version of Tito Olivera. But the biggest advantage she had was that the cops would be thinking that if she'd left Camp Pendleton just after midnight, she would have crossed into Mexico long ago, and by now they would be less vigilant.

At least she hoped so—because one of the California cops was just approaching her car.

Kay had one of Rodney's CDs playing, a rap song, the volume way up, a guy screaming bitches this and bitches that, and she was bobbing her head to the music, tapping the beat on the steering wheel with her hands. The cop checked the license plate on her car, then looked at her—and as he did, she gave him a smile and a friendly wave, like she didn't have a worry in the world, and then went back to playing steering wheel bongos. The cop barely glanced at her and moved on.

Thank you, Jesus.

A mile into Mexico, Kay pulled to the side of the road and called Colonel Roman Quinterez of the Policía Federal.

—

M
exican law-enforcement personnel have a reputation for being extremely corrupt, especially when it comes to the cartels, and such corruption was somewhat understandable. Cops in Mexico earn as little as three hundred dollars a month—about the price of an eighth of an ounce of cocaine.

There was also the violence. The cartels had demonstrated too many times that they would kill anyone: cops, politicians, judges, journalists. No one was safe. And they didn't just kill the people they had some issue with; they sometimes killed their families as well, and the killings were often incredibly gruesome. This didn't mean, however, that there weren't honest men and women in Mexico, men and women brave enough to take on the
narcotraficantes
. One of those people was Roman Quinterez.

The cartels couldn't buy Roman, because he was already rich. They couldn't get to him through his family, because his family was dead. His mother and father had died of natural causes, but his wife and twelve-year-old daughter were killed when they were caught in a cross fire between two gangs in Mexico City. One of the gangs worked for Caesar Olivera; the other worked for a rival cartel that was now extinct. Roman knew his beautiful wife and daughter were not killed intentionally, but that didn't mean that he held Caesar Olivera any less responsible.

Roman was a brave man but not a fool. Kay knew he rarely stayed in the same place for more than two nights in a row. His bodyguards were federal police officers, but they were men he had handpicked, and he paid them out of his own pocket and paid them well. They were also men who had their own reasons for hating the cartels: brothers who had been killed, sisters who had been raped, friends who were collateral damage in the constant warfare.

Roman had spent ten years—the decade following the deaths of his wife and daughter—trying to bring down Caesar Olivera, and he told Kay one time that he had come to a sad conclusion: He was nothing more than an angry bee buzzing around the head of a grizzly bear. The bee would sting whenever it could, but it had no more chance of killing the bear than . . . well, than a bee. But Roman continued to try. He disrupted cartel drug shipments leaving Mexico and seized weapons coming in. He passed information to the DEA because he wanted the cartel's men arrested in the U.S., where they were much more likely to go to prison. Kay had also heard—she'd heard this from several sources—that when Roman did succeed in tracking down cartel gunmen on his native soil, he didn't arrest them. Arresting them would be pointless. He killed them.

Roman was a pragmatist.

But Caesar Olivera was too well protected to kill, and at this point in his life, he was too far removed from the crimes he committed to be arrested. If he was arrested, there was no way he'd ever be convicted. Not in a Mexican court. So Roman did what he could: He jabbed his small stinger into Olivera's operations as often as possible, and he would continue to do so as long as he lived.

Roman Quinterez was the DEA's most powerful ally in Mexico.

Kay had met with Roman three times in San Diego when she was building a case against Tito Olivera. Roman liked her and wanted to go to bed with her, and Kay had considered taking him into her bed. Roman was only ten years older than her, very handsome and very charming, but the circumstances had never been quite right. For one thing, she was seeing Robert Meyer at the time, but she also wanted her relationship with Roman to remain professional, at least until after she had dealt with Tito.

Now she wished she had gone to bed with him.

Roman Quinterez was the only person on earth who could help Kay save her daughter.

—

W
hen Roman answered the phone, he sounded as if he'd been sleeping—and knowing Roman, he wasn't sleeping alone.

“Roman, it's Kay Hamilton. I need to see you.”

Roman didn't say anything for a long time. “I've been told that you've done a very bad thing, Kay. I hope what I've been told is not true.”

“It's true, Roman. I helped Tito Olivera escape. But that's only half the story. Caesar Olivera kidnapped my daughter, and I—”

“Your daughter?”

The last time she'd seen Roman, she didn't have a daughter.

“It's a long story, and I don't want to tell it to you over the phone. I need to see you. Right away.”

Roman paused again, a pause so long that Kay knew he was debating whether or not he should meet with her. Or maybe he was thinking he should meet with her—then arrest her and turn her over to the Americans.

“Roman,” Kay said, “my daughter is going to die if you don't help me. Just meet me and listen to what I have to say.”

“All right, Kay. But God help you if you're lying to me. Where are you now?”

“I just crossed the border.”

Roman gave her directions to a laundromat in Tijuana.

“A laundromat?” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Go inside and wait for me. I'll be there in less than an hour.”

“You're in Tijuana?” she said. She thought he'd be in Mexico City, and it would take three or four hours for him to get to Tijuana.

“Yes. I came up here a couple days ago. A personal thing.”

Like maybe the woman he was with?

“Anyway, go to the laundromat,” Roman said. “I'll be there as soon as I can.”

—

T
he laundromat contained two dozen fairly new washers and dryers, but at six-thirty in the morning only four of the machines were being used. There were two women sitting in plastic chairs, drinking coffee and chatting when Kay walked in, and they looked over at her, probably wondering why an American woman was here at this time of day. She took a seat away from the windows where she was almost hidden by one of the washing machines.

Kay could hear the two women talking; they probably didn't think she could speak Spanish. They were going on and on about some guy named Paulo who was apparently a rat and cheating on one of the women's daughters. They kept giving her darting glances, and Kay wished that she had something to launder so she wouldn't look so out of place.

Roman arrived forty minutes later. He walked over and spoke to the women, and Kay wondered why. Did the women work for Roman? Were they really lookouts and not two middle-aged women doing the weekly wash?

Roman made a gesture for Kay to follow him. He opened a side door with a key and they went up a flight of stairs. On the upper floor of the laundromat were an office and two bedrooms—making Kay wonder if the laundromat was some sort of safe house used by the Policía Federal.

The office had a battered wooden desk, an old but comfortable-looking leather chair behind the desk, two wooden chairs in front of the desk, a file cabinet, and several large maps of Mexico on the walls. Behind the desk was a brightly colored Gauguin print, one showing women washing clothes in a stream. Roman's idea of irony?

Normally, when Roman saw Kay, he hugged her tightly, kissed her on the cheek, and complimented her on her looks. This time he just took a seat behind the desk and pointed her to one of the wooden chairs. He was treating her the way a cop would treat a suspect.

“What is this place?” she asked.

Roman shrugged. “It's a laundromat. I own it.”

Roman wore a gorgeous gray suit and a bright blue shirt with his initials monogrammed on the pocket. She had never seen him when he wasn't dressed like a model ready to pose for the cover of
GQ
. He had a full head of curly dark hair and a perfectly shaped Vandyke beard. There was not a gray strand in his hair or beard, and knowing how vain he was, Kay suspected that he used dye.

“Your boss called me at four this morning and told me that you helped Tito Olivera escape from Camp Pendleton and you were probably already in Mexico with him. Mr. Davis asked for my help in finding you and sending you back to the United States.”

“Tito Olivera is dead,” Kay said. “And like I told you, Caesar Olivera kidnapped my daughter.”

Then Kay told him the whole story.

“Mora told me that Jessica is here in Tijuana,” Kay said. “I don't think he was lying, because he'd probably want her someplace close to the border so he could exchange her for Tito. I need you to help me find out where they're keeping her, and I need to find her fast, before Mora figures out that I don't have Tito.”

Roman shook his head. “What you're asking is impossible, Kay. This is a big city. There are almost two million people in the metropolitan area. If I called out a thousand men to look for her, which I could, Caesar Olivera would immediately be informed. And how would I find her? I can't search every house in Tijuana.”

“Jessica has a cell phone. You can find her using that.”

Roman shook his head again. “Raphael Mora is an intelligent man, and he's not ignorant when it comes to technology. He's already dumped her cell phone.” He saw Kay start to object, and he held up his hand. “Give me the number and the name of the provider, and I'll get someone to see if your daughter's cell phone is still working.”

Roman made a call and asked whoever he was talking to see if he could locate Jessica's cell phone. While they waited, Roman went out for coffee and sweet rolls. He had just returned to the laundromat when he received a call back: Jessica's cell phone had either been destroyed or the battery had been removed, so the GPS chip wasn't active.

“Goddamnit,” Kay muttered. She thought for a moment, then said, “Maybe we can find the place where she's being kept through property records.”

“Kay, it would take months to identify all the property Caesar owns in Mexico, and a lot of his property is held by companies he owns and not by him personally. Or he could be keeping her in a place owned by one of his men. I'm telling you: There is no way to find your daughter, not in just a few hours.”

“What about your snitches? You must have snitches in his organization. Contact them and see if they've heard anything.”

“Kay, I don't have snitches in his organization. You need to understand that it's not like in the United States. Caesar's people aren't afraid of being arrested, so I can't threaten them with jail if they refuse to talk to me. And they all know Caesar will kill them and their families if they ever do talk to me.”

“But there
must
be a way to find her,” Kay said again. “There has to be.”

Roman shook his head. “I'm sorry.”

Kay felt herself on the verge of tears—and she couldn't remember the last time she'd cried, probably ten years before when her folks died. She immediately clamped down hard on the sudden surge of emotion. There was no time for tears.

“Then I need to find some way to get to Caesar,” she said. “I'll force him to release my daughter.”

Roman shook his head, as if he felt sorry for her. “Kay, Caesar Olivera is protected as well as the president of the United States.”

“I have to try,” Kay said. “Mora said they're going to put Jessica in a whorehouse if they don't kill her. She's fifteen years old, Roman. So do you know where Caesar is?”

“Of course. I always know where Caesar is, and right now he's at his place in Rosarito Beach.”