Sean Black - The Devil's bounty

He had made it and now straight ahead he could see a row of low buildings. He dug into his front pocket and pulled out a roll of dollars. It was more than enough to buy him sanctuary, a place to hide out until he could be picked up. No one would ask too many questions. No one around here did. People like him, crazy gringos in trouble, simply materialized, and then they were gone.

Tired after the long trek, and on the down slope of an adrenalin rush, he started forward. Less than two hundred yards away there was a tiny one-room shack, one wall made from cinder blocks, the others cobbled together from pieces of wood with a corrugated-iron roof. A child’s bicycle lay on its side. Next to it were two large cooking pots, left out for the rats and mice to clear. Charlie picked up the bicycle and stood it up. It was too small for him even to attempt to ride it. He let it fall back to the ground.

He kept moving. There were more shacks and, beyond them, he could see lone pairs of headlights signalling a road. Sooner or later he had to find someone who could give him a ride, and if the money didn’t cut it he had a back-up plan, something he had rifled from the Escalade.

A thousand yards. That was all that stood between Lock and the retreating figure of Mendez as the colonia folded around them. Mendez was pushing open a three-bar gate, which guarded the entrance to the row of shacks. Beyond was a road.

The beam of the helicopter patterned the ridge above them, the edge of the cone of light seeping over to touch the shack. As Lock ran, his foot caught on something. He stumbled and fell. The back wheel of a child’s bike spun where his trailing leg had caught it. He got back to his feet and set off again, breaking into a full-on sprint.

A car was heading down the road. Mendez had stopped in the middle and was waving his arms, trying to flag it down. Lock still had four hundred yards to go as the car slowed and halted.

As he reached the gate, he saw Mendez lean towards the driver’s window, speaking to the driver, and waving something at him or her. The next word he heard was ‘ Gracias ’, and then Mendez was skirting around the car. Drawing his weapon, Lock screamed at the driver to stop as the helicopter roared above him and he was engulfed in a blinding light.

The car — clearly the driver had thought better of their offer — sped away, leaving Mendez stranded in the middle of the road. The helicopter dropped lower, Lock still in the circle of light, as people emerged from the nearby shacks, roused by the commotion, curiosity getting the snap on fear.

Lock ran towards Mendez, aware that he could be taken down at any minute by a hail of gunfire from the helicopter. For a second, Mendez seemed paralysed by Lock’s sudden appearance or, perhaps, by how close he’d been to getting away. He stared after the departing car. When he looked back, Lock was a hundred yards from him, and the circle of light was covering both men as the helicopter rose into the air on an updraught of desert wind.

Lock gun-faced him. ‘Don’t move!’

But Mendez wasn’t about to start doing as he was told. He pivoted round and made a break for a patch of ground next to the road, beyond which was another set of shacks, the fringe of a bigger, more densely packed colonia.

The blacktop behind Mendez splintered as a couple of rounds dug into the tarmac. They had come from the helicopter because Lock had yet to fire. It banked to one side, the pilot moving into position so that whoever was firing had a better angle from which to take out Mendez.

Mendez zigzagged across the ground as the helicopter moved alongside him, the pilot struggling to keep it steady, the searchlight punching its cone of light into the colonia. Lock saw the barrel of a semi-automatic pop out from the side door as another gust of desert wind caught the helicopter, lifting it fractionally and taking out the gunman’s angle.

He took the shot anyway, the mark of an amateur, and a three-round burst fractured the air, threatening everyone but Mendez. The downside of the manoeuvre was that the searchlight lost Mendez as he sprinted towards the colonia.

Lock went after him, temporarily holstering his weapon, and charging over ground littered with broken glass. Mendez slipped through a gap between two houses as the downdraught from the aircraft blew up a thick cloud of dust.

In the narrow alley, as the helicopter climbed, Lock looked around. There was no sign of Mendez. He walked slowly now, trying to block out the noise of the thrashing rotor blades and pick out his target, but it was an impossible task.

The alley, if it qualified for alley status, was about three feet wide and ran for about eighteen. It seemed devoid of life. Lock slowed before he stepped out into the street — and from nowhere a fist slammed into the side of his face just below the right eye, throwing him off balance.

Lock stumbled, taking two steps back, then found his balance and moved on to his toes, like a boxer. He shook his head, centred himself and looked to his left. Charlie Mendez was right there, but he had frozen again. Lock rushed him, driving his shoulder hard up into Mendez’s chest, catching him slap-bang in the solar plexus. He followed with two quick but full-force elbows to the man’s face. By the time the second landed, Mendez had his hands up but Lock hadn’t finished. Stepping in close, he butted his opponent full in the face, hearing the satisfying dull crunch of the cartilage in his nose cracking with the force of the blow. Mendez let out a whimper as Lock stepped back, fished in a pocket for some plastic ties and went to work securing his wrists. When they were cinched tight enough to be painful, Lock gave him the fastest of pat-downs.

With the helicopter directing reinforcements straight towards them, Lock propelled his prisoner forwards, down the street, as a sea of small brown faces peered from the houses, only to be dragged away from the windows by mothers and grandmothers.

He felt no sense of accomplishment. If at all, it would come later. He had Mendez but the chances of being able to keep him long enough to get him back across the border were slim. And if the action of the gunman who had fired from the helicopter was anything to go by, Mendez’s protectors had experienced a change of heart. If they both stayed alive long enough, Lock might even discover why.

In the meantime, he pushed the whining Mendez down the narrow street, praying for a miracle with every step he took.

The American consulate was housed on the third floor of a downtown office building. Once they had stepped inside no one outside could do anything to either Ty or Julia. Consulates and embassies counted as American soil so, to all intents and purposes, they would be on home turf. But there was a snag.

The consulate didn’t open for another hour and, right now, reaching it in one piece was looking about as likely as fashioning a rocket out of baking trays and flying to the moon. Hunched over the steering-wheel, Ty watched as the traffic snaked along the road towards a police checkpoint. Twenty vehicles ahead, a squad of local cops were interrogating a smartly dressed man, who was leaning out of his car, no doubt protesting at the lengthy delay.

Julia shuffled forward from the back seat. ‘Can’t we just ask those cops there to give us an escort?’

‘We could,’ Ty growled. ‘The only problem is they might just escort us somewhere else instead. Like right back to the people who were looking after Charlie Mendez.’

‘The police?’

Ty thought back to when he’d been that naive about the world. Nope, his memory didn’t go back that far. Not that he blamed Julia: we were all products of our experience and her experience, growing up as a white, middle-class American in a loving family, had left her lacking the necessary insight into just how messed up large parts of the planet actually were. In her world, cops were on your side. Down here some of them were, and some of them were with the bad guys. The problem was that they both wore the same uniform, so there was no knowing for sure which type an individual was.