James Patterson - Gone

Diaz put a hand to my chest as I reached in to grab the criminal who was screaming bubbles now under the rushing water.

“Give him a second, Mike,” Diaz said. “He needs to see how serious we are.”

“Exactly,” Bassman said, taking out a smartphone and thumbing it. “Let this guy soak his weary bones for a minute in peace, Mike. Can’t you see he’s had a hard day?”

Though he hadn’t been to it in over a year, the estate in the Sierra de Pachuca, fifteen miles outside the central-eastern Mexican town of Real del Monte, was by far Perrine’s favorite.

Built around a once-flourishing silver mine, the twenty-plus square miles of his property had been part of one of the original haciendas given by the Spanish crown to one of Cortés’s captains. The original grant was hung in a frame above the fireplace in Perrine’s office. At parties, Perrine made a point to show his guests the section on the yellowed parchment that granted the landowner not only the acreage and natural resources, but full ownership of all the area’s inhabitants as well.

The beauty of a good ranching hacienda like Perrine’s was not just its plush main house and gardens, but its complete self-sufficiency and sustainability. On the twelve thousand rolling acres, they farmed massive herds of cattle and sheep, countless chickens. They even had corn and soybean fields and several freshwater resources, including a fish-filled mountain river. The staff who lived on the hacienda all year round was in excess of forty people. They were mostly vaqueros, whom Perrine took great pleasure riding with whenever he was in attendance.

In summers past, in exchange for the local governor’s discretion and friendship, the hacienda often ran a children’s camp for local charities. But the last two weeks of August were reserved for Perrine’s expansive family’s dozens of children. The last time he had attended, two years before, eleven of the children were Perrine’s own. The children’s eight different mothers also stayed.

Perrine fondly remembered eating dinner with them poolside, night after night, flirting with them as the endless courses and wines were brought by an army of waiters. After the fifth course, he would have trouble putting names to faces. After the seventh, he’d stop caring.

He smiled at the memories. Had he ever been happier than during those two weeks, playing with the bands of his happy, screaming children all day and with their mommies all night? Had anyone?

But as his plane touched down on his airstrip late that morning, the estate was empty of all guests. Though he had sold the hacienda to a dummy buyer years before, he knew that it was possible for the Americans to know his connection to it, so he very rarely and briefly visited it these days. He’d come now only after a trusted source high up in the local policía had assured him there were no special directives to watch the place, no suspicious gringos suddenly filling the local hotels.

Even if there had been any chatter, even with his current American project under way, Perrine would have been hard-pressed to cancel the affair that he was putting on tonight-it would have been unthinkable to shutter the event. He lived for the cartel’s annual bonus party, a formal dinner for himself and his top one hundred captains, resplendent with speeches and toasts and culminating in waiters carrying valises filled with cash on silver trays.

Perrine sighed wistfully along with his Global Express’s whining jet engines as the plane taxied down the runway behind his twenty-one-thousand-square-foot mansion.

What a life , he thought, taking off his sleeping mask and handing it to the new, blond American stewardess, Marcia, with a wink. He was truly a blessed man.

Old Beto, Perrine’s head vaquero, was standing beside his long-faced butler, Arthur, on the other side of the forty-five-million-dollar aircraft’s drop-down stairs.

“Beto, what is it? You look excited,” Perrine cried in Spanish as he handed his English butler his silk sport coat and began rolling up his sleeves. “Don’t tell me she foaled?”

Bowlegged Beto nodded rapidly and smiled, the laugh lines around his bright eyes like cracks in brown glass.

“Show me immediately.”

They walked along the front of his massive, marble-stepped mansion and around the pool to the air-conditioned barn. Though he had several Thoroughbred racehorses, Perrine’s real passion was for the show horses. They walked past stalls filled with several million dollars’ worth of them. He stopped to pat and pet his favorites, She-Wolf, and Blue, and Troubled Queen. The prize horses took their names from the Jackson Pollock paintings that hung in the mansion’s front hallway.

Perrine peered into Troubled Queen’s stall at the new-born foal. It was a filly, like he’d predicted. A pale-strawberry roan as pretty as her mother. The little horse peered back at him shyly before tucking itself back in, next to its mother.

“Look! She is afraid of me, Beto!” Perrine complained. “Can you believe this? Afraid of me?”

There was a troubled look on Beto’s face.

“What is it?” Perrine asked.

“What are we to call her?”

Perrine stared at the baby horse, a finger pressed to his pursed lips. He finally raised his finger in the air like a maestro.

“We shall call her La Rose,” Perrine announced.

“La Rose,” Beto repeated reverently as Perrine patted the old man on his shoulder and turned.

What he didn’t tell Beto was that “La Rose” came from the name of the captivating Paul Delvaux painting that he’d just picked up at Sotheby’s. Eighteen million was probably a tad pricey for the Belgian surrealist , Perrine thought, rolling his sleeves back down, but, hey, you can’t take it with you.

Arthur was waiting for him outside the front door of the barn, holding his cream-colored jacket. Perrine slipped back into it and shot the cuffs.

“Arthur,” he said.

“Yes, Mr. Perrine?”

“A plane will be coming in about twenty minutes with quite a few, uh, lake-house guests aboard.”

Arthur nodded without batting an eyelash. The lake house was where the men liked to blow off steam after the bonus-party festivities. Morning cleanup usually involved hoses and shovels, but boys will be boys.

“Are those new cameras that I ordered installed?”

“They went online yesterday with a closed-circuit feed into your bedroom, as you insisted,” Arthur said. “Shall I have Hector and Junior waiting with the van at the airfield?”

“Yes, you shall, Arthur. Please remind them and the rest of the staff that these are special guests. Guests who will be treated with the utmost respect.”

Perrine smiled proudly as he walked with his manservant toward his glittering pool, the tiers of manicured gardens, his magnificent mansion.

“That is, until I kill them, of course,” he said.

After another half hour, it looked like we’d gotten everything we were going to get out of Tomás Neves.

Between dunkings, he told us he had taken Perrine to a San Diego cartel house with a tunnel in its basement that went under the border. The tunnel exited in a tire shop, where a waiting car took Perrine to a plane at the Tijuana Airport.

He claimed that the plane had taken Perrine to an estate in Mexico near Real del Monte, where a party was going to take place. A chatty Salvajes cartel underling with whom he had coordinated Perrine’s transfer had bragged to him that his older brother had been invited to a black-tie function there tonight for what was called a bonus ceremony.

Suitcases of money would be ceremoniously handed out as hookers were brought in by the busload. Neves told us it was common knowledge that nothing made Perrine happier than drinking and carousing with his most efficient and most brutal soldiers.