Robert Browne: Down Among the Dead Men

“Jesus. And nobody’s been able to confirm this?”

“Like I said, pocho. Ghosts.”

“And this girl in Tijuana. She must’ve been pretty special.”

Ortiz shrugged again. “I didn’t really know Gracilia all that well. But I could have, amigo. I could have.”

Vargas thought about Beth. Despite what they’d been through, he didn’t really know her all that well, either. But he hoped to hell he wouldn’t one day be saying he could have.

He knew he had every reason to blame himself for what had happened tonight. But he’d already been through the blame game with Manny, feeling like he should’ve been a better brother. Thinking if he’d done something different, Manny would still be alive.

No point in retreading that territory. He’d made choices tonight, and they’d had consequences.

Besides, this wasn’t over. And he had no intention of leaving Mexico without Beth.

They cruised in silence for a while; then Ortiz’s cell phone rang.

Swearing under his breath, Ortiz pulled it out of his pocket and glanced at the screen.

“Holy shit. It’s you again.”

Vargas turned sharply and snatched the phone from him, clicking it on. “She’d better be alive, asshole.”

“…Nick?”

It was Beth.

“Jesus Christ, Beth, where are you? Are you okay?”

She started to cry, her voice trembling. “I think I killed him, Nick. We wrecked the car and I found your phone in his pocket. I…I think he’s dead.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No…I don’t know. I shouldn’t have killed him…he knows where she is…But I couldn’t help myself, I-”

“Where are you?”

“By the ocean,” she said. “I’m by the ocean, near a lighthouse. I need clothes. He wouldn’t even give me a blanket…a fucking blanket…”

“Just hold on, Beth; we’re coming.”

“We have to get to Ciudad de Almas…They’ve got Jen there…We have to get there before…before…”

There was a long silence.

“Beth?”

Then the phone went dead.

“Shit,” Vargas said, turning to Ortiz. “Is there a lighthouse around here?”

“Down the road. About thirty minutes.”

Vargas dialed his number and listened to it ring. “Make it twenty,” he said.

And Ortiz hit the gas.

They found her on the beach, using the ring of the cell phone to guide them. The lighthouse sat shining in the distance, on a rocky patch of land that jutted out toward the ocean.

She was lying faceup in the sand, a pale, naked figure, out cold, still clutching Vargas’s phone in her hand.

Vargas’s first instinct was to panic, but then he felt for a pulse and got a strong one.

She was alive. A bit battered and bruised, but alive.

Ortiz brought a blanket from the trunk of the Barracuda and they wrapped it around her. And as Vargas pulled her into his arms, Beth stirred, looking up at him.

“Easy,” he said. “Easy.”

When she realized who it was, she heaved a soft sigh and threw her arms around him.

“Nick…”

They kissed, and Vargas suddenly realized how worried he’d been. He’d kept his emotions crammed deep, but now that he’d found her and she was alive and in one piece, his relief was a tangible, living thing.

When he’d seen the condition of the Jaguar, and Mr. Blister’s broken body inside, Vargas couldn’t fathom how Beth had managed to escape.

Breaking from the kiss, Beth said, “We have to go. We have get to Ciudad de Almas.”

“We’re not going anywhere until you see a doctor.”

She pulled away from him. “No, we have to go now. Rafael told me they have Jennifer and Andy.”

“Andy? Who’s Andy?”

“I’ll explain in the car. I tried checking his phone for numbers, but it was broken in the crash. We can’t waste any time. We have to find them before midnight tomorrow.”

“I don’t mean to rain on your parade,” Ortiz said. “But that could be a problem unless you got a map with an X on it. Ciudad de Almas is almost as big as Playa Azul.”

Ignoring him, Vargas said to Beth, “What happens at midnight?”

Despite the heat, she shivered, pulling the blanket close. “That’s when the cleansing begins. A cleansing by fire.”

Ortiz hadn’t been lying about needing a map with an X on it.

Once a small fishing village off the Sea of Cortez, Ciudad de Almas had at least quadrupled in size over the decades, taking up a long stretch of coastline.

The city was a mix of old and new: retro adobe buildings nestled between modern business offices and tourist shops.

But what stood out were the cliffs that overlooked the place like all-seeing, all-knowing gods.

The sun was up well before they arrived. The drive had been long-Ortiz refusing to relinquish the wheel-so Vargas and Beth had slept in the backseat, arms intertwined.

When they pulled into town, the Dia de los Muertos festival had begun in earnest. Everywhere you turned, there was celebration: a street parade full of papier-mache skulls, mariachi bands, dancing children with painted faces, tourists and locals wearing skull masks, all under the watchful eye of the local policia.

It was, for the most part, a harmless exercise in tradition, a joyous occasion for everyone involved. But somewhere in town, that X was marked, and the lives of a woman and her son depended on them finding it.

While Vargas bought Beth a pair of jeans and a Day of the Dead T-shirt and waited for her to dress under the blanket in the car, Ortiz tracked down a local map.

None of them were hungry, but they knew they needed something to give them energy, so they found a small cafe, ordered espressos and Mexican pastries, and unfolded the map in front of them.

“Here’s the listing of landmarks,” Beth said, then ran her finger down the page.

There was a fierceness to her demeanor that Vargas hadn’t seen before. A clarity of purpose.

He couldn’t be sure, of course-he was no expert-but he sensed that after last night’s violence she had turned some kind of corner, and had seen the last of her headaches.

Her refusal to visit a doctor hadn’t surprised Vargas. Despite the emotional seesaw she’d been riding, she was a strong, stubborn woman, as determined as she was beautiful.

“Here it is,” she said. “ Iglesia del Sagrado Corazon. Church of the Sacred Heart.”

“You realize,” Vargas told her, “there’s no guarantee this priest will know anything.”

Ortiz cut in before Beth could respond. “Like you said last night. It’s the only thing we’ve got.”

“He knows something,” Beth said. She had a faraway look in her eyes. Had gone inward for a moment.

“How can you be sure?”

She focused on Vargas now. “There’s something about this place that speaks to me, Nick. Rafael said it was my home for a while, and I definitely feel like I’ve been here before.”

“You’re starting to remember?”

She shook her head. “Not exactly. It’s like what I told you about the whole Andy thing-I see these dark shapes, and I’m just waiting for them to surface.”

Vargas had been thrown by the Andy/Angie revelation. There had never been any indication that a child was involved in this, but each new day Vargas spent with this story seemed to bring a fresh new surprise.

“And the priest is one of those shapes?”

“He’d have to be, wouldn’t he? The nuns in that house didn’t just happen to bump into me on the road. Whatever we were up to, we were in it together and the priest knows about it. I’m sure he does.”

“How far is the church?” Vargas asked.

Ortiz was measuring the distance with his fingers. “Not far,” he said. “We could drive, but with everything going on around here, we might be better off on foot.”