The Devil's bounty

Forty

As the sun crept over the horizon, Lock scanned the narco-mansion with a pair of binoculars, careful to angle them in such a way that he avoided the sharp sunlight striking the lens. From his vantage-point in the front room of the small, dusty apartment, he had a clear view of the house’s back yard with its shimmering swimming pool. To the right of the pool, french windows led into the main house; to the left there was a small single-storey guest-house, perhaps eighty feet long and forty deep.

No one was around, save a gardener, who was clearing leaves from the water. Lock counted two fixed-position closed-circuit cameras, one mounted on either corner of the house, their lenses triangulating over the pool and the yard towards the guesthouse. The first hour of watching had already started to weigh on him. Ty, pacing the floor behind him, didn’t help. By definition, surveillance was a waiting game that required patience and, with the American girl missing, he was all out of it.

Their plan was needle-in-a-haystack stuff. Between them, the men connected to Mendez would have dozens of possible safe-houses at their disposal. With all the drugs that flowed through the city, hiding places would be legion and of good quality. Lock imagined that if you had something, or someone, you wanted to hide, there would be plenty of options available to you.

The only plus for them was that Rafaela had managed to retrieve not only their vehicle but also the gear they had brought down and their weapons, checking everything out from the police station on the pretext that, with them gone, it was better destroyed. The vehicle was no good to them now so they had emptied it of its contents and hidden it close to her apartment.

On the hour, Lock handed the binoculars to Ty. This was no good. For all they knew the house might be completely empty and, in any event, they had only a partial view of it. If he was there, Charlie Mendez could walk out of the front door with the girl, and they would be oblivious to the whole thing.

‘This sucks,’ he said to Ty.

‘Yup. You have other ideas?’

Lock unscrewed the top from a bottle of water and took a sip. The building was hot: there was no air-conditioning, and because the apartment was supposedly unoccupied, the windows had to stay closed, the drapes, too, apart from a narrow gap. ‘They’re protecting Mendez, they have the girl, and we have no clue where either of them is, so, no, I’m all out of ideas. You?’

Ty lowered the binoculars. ‘I was counting on you coming up with something. Man, this country is messed up. How’d you figure a place gets like this?’

‘Corrupt?’

‘Yeah.’

Lock hadn’t given it much thought until Ty had asked the question. ‘Slowly, I guess. You do someone a favour, look to make some easy money, and once you’re in, there’s no going back. I don’t know.’

‘And how do you figure these people get their country back?’ Ty said. ‘That’s gonna be even slower, right? Easy to get into the dirt, harder to get clean again.’

‘There are good people, like Rafaela.’

‘Not many of them,’ said Ty. ‘I mean, most people aren’t going to stand up to these guys. They don’t want to take the risk. They got families, kids.’

Lock stood behind Tyrone and stared down at the shimmering surface of the swimming pool as the gardener dumped the last of the leaves into a wheelbarrow. An idea was forming. It was a bad idea, bordering on reckless, but right now it was the only one he had.