Sean Black - The Devil's bounty

Across the restaurant, the rap stars had ordered a three-hundred-dollar bottle of champagne. Their dates giggled. Ty gave them a sour look.

‘Could serve those dudes this,’ he said, raising his icy glass of Sprite, ‘and they wouldn’t know the difference.’

‘Hey, they’re paying you good money to sit in this fancy restaurant sipping Sprite.’

They settled back into their seats and waited out the appetizers, entrees and dessert. As the entrees were cleared, Lock noticed movement across the street. The red Honda Accord nudged its way out into the traffic on Pico Boulevard. It had been rented to a private detective working out of Van Nuys, an ex-cop. He would have been hired by an intermediary who had in turn been instructed by another. A cover story would have been concocted to explain the surveillance. A cheating wife with a penchant for guys like Lock, something of that nature. He would probably never know that he was working for the bad guys and Lock wasn’t going to tell him. He was merely a piece on the board. Let him get on and do his job.

Lock checked his watch. The guy had either quit for the night or the week’s surveillance that he’d been paid for had expired. He wouldn’t know whether it was the former or the latter until tomorrow. He guessed it was the latter. Keeping eyes on someone when nothing was happening would lead to questions and whoever was ultimately paying him had probably had enough of questions.

Lock ordered another glass of mineral water and reflected that sometimes the best thing you could do was nothing, though for him it was also the hardest. The rappers were arguing over whose Amex Black card, supplied by the record company, would be used to pick up the check. Neither Lock nor Ty had the heart to tell them the company was simply making sure that they would pay for every dollar’s worth of their extravagant lifestyle. They would learn the hard way. You never got something for nothing. Everything in life came with a price.

Lock slotted the plastic key card into the hotel-room door. The light beside the handle flicked to green. He retrieved the card, turned the handle and walked into their temporary operations room. As Ty stood behind him, he pulled a bag from the closet, retrieved a scanner and swept the room for covert listening devices. It was clear. The cleaners had been instructed to leave the room alone, and he had placed a small motion-activated video camera in a far corner. Ty sat down at his desk, opened his laptop and scanned the footage. ‘We’re good,’ he said.

Using a 32-bit encrypted secure Internet connection, Ty logged on to his email account. As he worked through it, Lock laid a map on the bed. Red dots showed locations where Charlie Mendez was thought to have been. Some of the sightings had been confirmed; most had not. The majority were from the period immediately after his flight, before the media had cycled on to the next hot story. Tourists and visitors, eager to help, had called in saying they had seen him in various resorts. One such encounter, confirmed via video footage, had placed him in Cancun, probably the most popular tourist destination for Americans. But that had been months ago. Since Brady’s death, he might have been wiped from the face of the planet.

Lock stood behind his partner. ‘Anything new?’

‘Our boy Charlie’s like Brer Rabbit. The mofo, he lay low.’

‘You should be a poet, Tyrone.’

Ty smiled. ‘Maybe when I retire.’

He returned to the emails, and Lock to the map. Unless Mendez had taken off for another country, the clusters of confirmed sightings had him in the north-east of Mexico, close to the border. It was a puzzle. If Lock had been in his position, he would have driven south, moving deeper into Latin and South America. That he appeared to have stayed within the same three-or-four-hundred-mile radius seemed to back up Lock’s suspicion that Mendez was under someone’s protection, most likely a cartel or gang.

Five years ago it would have been easy to work out who was shielding him. There had been the Gulf Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel. Between them they had carved up drug- and people-trafficking in Mexico. Then there had been a US-funded crackdown by the Mexican government, the subsequent emergence of the paramilitary Los Zetas, and a volatile fracturing of the drug-trafficking industry. The cartels were still there, still powerful, but the vertically integrated business structures they had used to operate their business had eroded to the point at which it was very difficult to figure out who was working for whom. Worst of all, with the fragmentation came more violence. Before, it had served a business function; now more and more people were killed, raped and tortured, not to intimidate, clear away competition or for profit, but for almost recreational reasons.

Also, the cartels were outsourcing many aspects of their business, from transport to security to money laundering. As with legitimate business, it saved money, but it also distanced those at the very top from the things that could land you in prison. If a drug lord could claim he had had no idea that a sub-contractor was flouting safety laws, he could wash his hands of the latest criminal outrage. After all, the people committing these atrocities weren’t his men. The idea of plausible deniability had found favour with organized crime.

All of these changes had meant that tracking Mendez was proving a lot tougher than Lock had anticipated. To make matters even more difficult, his strategy of convincing whoever was tracking him that he had no interest in Mendez meant that he couldn’t be overt in gathering intelligence. At some point, though, that would have to change. To capture Mendez, they had to find him and, so far, they were getting nowhere fast.

Ty got up and stretched, locking his fingers behind his head and kneading his neck. ‘Nothing. No one’s seen him. No one’s heard of anyone who’s seen him.’

Lock kicked at the foot of the bed in frustration. ‘He’s got to surface at some point.’

‘Apart from that detective in Santa Barbara and Brady’s wife, did you think about talking to someone at the Department of Justice or in the US Marshals Service?’

Lock walked to the window and looked out over the City of Angels. ‘Marshals aren’t going to go after him down there and the DOJ have their hands full. Charlie Mendez is old news. Sure, if he gets pinched down there they’ll send someone to pick him up, but go looking for him? Nah.’

That was the other difficulty with finding Mendez. Over the past few months relations between the Mexican and United States governments had become even more frayed. As the narco-wars began to spill over the border and Mexican government corruption became more obvious, cooperation between American state agencies and their counterparts in Mexico had been strained, with distrust on both sides. Simply put, there was no appetite for anyone in Mexico or the US to go looking for a serial rapist. They had bigger fish to fry.

‘I’m beat. You mind if I turn in?’ Ty said.

‘Sure. Go ahead.’

Ty walked to the door. ‘We’ll find him.’

Lock waved a goodnight and turned back to the map on his bed. He continued to pore over it, hoping it would give up its secrets, willing a pattern into existence, searching for a clue, however small, that would give them a starting point. But none came. Three hours later, he finally fell asleep.

Wrapped in the warmth of the fiery orange sun above the Pacific Ocean, Charlie Mendez stretched his lean, tanned body, and gave a loud yawn. The whole day stretched ahead of him. In a minute or two he would rise from his lounger, grab his surfboard and try to catch some waves. After an hour or so, he would come back into shore, head to the villa to shower, then go out to lunch. Afterwards, he would return to the villa with one of the local girls he rotated on a weekly basis. After a siesta with her, when he often ended up burning more calories than he did surfing, he would rest properly. Around seven, he would go to dinner, then drink in a local bar where he would pick up another girl, almost always a different one from the afternoon’s. By midnight he would be alone in bed and asleep.