David Lindsey - The Rules of Silence

“Titus, ”she said, “what's going on?”

At forty-six, Carla was a single mother of twin daughters who were soon to enter their freshman year at Vanderbilt University. Her husband had left her six years earlier when the girls were in the sixth grade, and Carla had immediately galvanized her mind and turned her life into a regimen. She was determined to do it all without him, and she did. She'd be damned if she would let her life fall apart in his absence. A man who would leave his wife and young daughters to fend for themselves couldn't have been all that valuable in the first place, she decided. She wouldn't let him be.

Titus had helped her throughout the whole ordeal. Whenever she needed to take off from work for the girls’school events, she never even had to ask. He boosted her salary to compensate for the loss of half her income, and he made sure the girls had summer jobs at CaiText so Carla didn't have to worry about them during the day.

Her husband had maddeningly given her the house in West Lake Hills without a whimper. The fact that he didn't think it worth fighting for infuriated her. And he didn't even fuss that much about the level of alimony she had demanded. He was in such a hurry to set up housekeeping with his new girlfriend that he practically ran from everything they had built together over fourteen years of marriage.

And then there was Darlene, his new woman. Darlene was half Carla's age. She was a blonde; Carla was a brunet. She was tall; Carla was not so tall. She was health-nut thin and tight; Carla was practical medium and not so tight. Darlene didn't work; Carla had worked for CaiText their entire marriage and was as loyal to Titus and the company he was building as if she owned half of it. The striking differences in the two women were an additional humiliation. Darlene was everything that Carla wasn't.

But that had been six years ago. She had created a new life and a new self. She had made a stable home for her daughters while she had nurtured them through the storms and stresses of adolescence. They were good girls, and she was proud of them.

Now, though, with the girls away from home for the first time at summer jobs in Denver that Titus had gotten for them, and soon to be off to their first year at the university, Carla found herself with a spare moment once in a while, for the first time in eighteen years. She was dating a man, Nathan Jordan, who was considerate and sensible and comfortable with the girls, who liked him very much. She was entering a new season in life, and it looked as if it were going to be a good one.

“Everything okay with Rita? ”she asked.

“Yeah, everything's fine. I talked with her last night.”

Pause. He could feel her listening to his voice, reading between the lines of the way he sounded. She was all over this.

“Come on Titus. What's going on?”

“I'm under a little pressure here, ”he said. “It's nothing to do with Rita. It's… financial. And it's personal, company's not involved. But Rita doesn't know about it yet. It doesn't seem right to go into it with you before I've had a chance to tell her.”

“Well… is it… disastrous? I mean, hell, Titus, give me something to put this in perspective.”

“Several months back I made some… risky investments. I've just learned that they've gone bad. I've lost a hell of a lot of money. I'm working out how to deal with it. I can tell you more in a few days. But right now, Carla, you're the only person who knows about this. Understand?”

“Yeah, Titus, I understand, ”she said, and he could hear the sympathy and the actual hurt in her voice. “Listen, I'm sorry to hear this. If I can do anything… I'll do anything I can.”

“I've got to go, ”he said.

Herrin's assistant with the jugular tattoo drove out of Titus's place in his pickup, his windows rolled down in the late morning heat, obviously alone, as anyone could see. In a hidden compartment under the bed of the pickup, Titus lay in the dark, guessing the truck's route by following the right and left turns as they made their way down the winding roads to Westlake Drive and headed toward town.

The ride downtown hardly registered on Titus. He carried no additional clothes, only his laptop, as Burden had instructed. He felt webby headed, his reflexes sluggish from the lack of sleep, his mind only slightly distracted by the rattling of equipment in the pickup's toolboxes and by the smell of plastics and electrical wiring.

Cline let him out in the first level of the Four Seasons underground parking garage, and Titus took the elevator down to the second level, where he met two men waiting beside a rental car. No introductions.

While one of the guys went over Titus with a debugging instrument, the other one opened his laptop and put it through a series of checks as well. Satisfied, they told him to lie down in the backseat of the car, and they drove out of the garage. A few minutes later they told him he could sit up, and he stared out the window into the bright summer light while they headed east out of downtown to Austin-Bergstrom International.

They bypassed the main terminal entrance and circled around behind to the charter flight hangars. The car drove straight onto the tarmac to a waiting King Air 350, and in twelve minutes Titus was in the air.

Alone in the cabin, he watched as the earth fell away outside the window, and when they began passing through the white, cumulous clouds, he reclined his seat as far as it would go. Still trying to understand how this could be happening to him, he fell asleep.

Awakened by the quickly sinking Beechcraft, he sat up just as they were touching down. Zipping past the window was a narrow valley, the grass lush with the summer rains and scattered with up-reaching fingers of garambullo cactus and huisache trees with gracefully outspread canopies. As the pilot turned the aircraft and cut back on the engines, Titus saw a black Suburban waiting at the edge of the isolated airstrip.

The driver was a hefty Mexican behind sunglasses and a mustache, polite but taciturn, and soon they were sailing along the valley's dirt road. Beyond the nearer rolling hills, the Sierra de Morenos stretched out in the blue distance as far as Titus could see. Finally they reached a two-lane paved road and turned south.

San Miguel de Allende was a small hillside town in central Mexico, a couple of hours north of Mexico City. Rich in colonial history, it was crowded with handsome churches and elegant homes clustered along narrow, and sometimes steep, cobblestone streets. It was famously beautiful and long had been a favorite retreat for wandering American writers and artists and eccentric expatriates with dubious pasts. For several decades now it had become a popular second-home destination for well-to-do Americans and a cosmopolitan international crowd.

After rambling into the heart of town, past the Jardin, and then up into the higher neighborhoods, the driver eventually squeezed the Suburban into a cobbled lane of simple, sunwashed walls. He stopped the groaning vehicle on a steep incline and said something in Spanish, gesturing at a massive, dark wooden door set in a fading cornflower blue wall. A jacaranda, lavish with blossoms like broken pieces of the sky, sheltered the doorway. To one side, a brilliant bougainvillea splashed over the top of a rock wall as if the stones were holding back a sea of magenta.

Titus got out with his laptop and waited for his driver to pull away up the hill before he crossed the lane. He stepped down from the steeply rising sidewalk to the level threshold of the cathedral-size door, banged the brass door knocker in the shape of a woman's hand, and waited as the sound echoed and died between the high walls of the lane.

Very quickly a normal-size door inset into the larger one was opened by a grandmotherly Indian, who smiled at him with bright teeth generously framed in gold. Her abundant black-and-gray-striated hair was parted in the middle and worn in two braids that reached down past her thick waist.