Seventy-two

As dusk fell, Lock led an unbound Mendez out of the back of the shack, across the scrubby patch of grass, over a rickety wooden fence with missing slats and into a back alley. In an ideal world, they would have left later, but Lock had no way of knowing when the woman whose home it was would return. Even more crucially, his cell phone had been powered up: there had been half a dozen phone calls as Mendez had made the arrangements for the money to be transferred. Every minute they stayed conceivably brought them a minute closer to being found.

The scuff of sneakers at the end of the alley sent Lock’s hand to the butt of his gun. A few seconds later a soccer ball rolled into view. It was followed by two teenage boys. They froze at the sight of the two men. Lock trapped the ball under his foot and waved them forward. He peeled off two five-dollar bills and handed one to each of them. ‘You didn’t see us,’ he said, tapping the ball back to them.

They traded a look, shoved the money into the pockets of their baggy jeans and sloped off into the gloom. Lock tapped at Mendez’s elbow and they moved off.

At the end of the alley Lock hunkered down in the dirt and checked their position on his GPS. Three hundred yards ahead lay a marshalling yard, used to store containers before they were hooked up to trucks and taken off for loading further south or north. When he had come across the yard on an earlier recon, he had thought about holing up in a container but decided against it. Right now they were less than a quarter-mile from the border, but the containers could end up anywhere. Cargo moved across the border came from as far away as China and went back that way too. Get in a container and you could die in there. It wasn’t a chance he was willing to take, but if they could make it to the marshalling yard they could use that as cover and as a final staging post. Once they were inside and reached the north-eastern corner of the yard, all that would stand between them and America was a long sprint across open ground towards the river and the newly erected border fence.

Crouched in the dirt, he watched the moon rise, and they waited for a truck to roll towards the yard entrance. At last one did and they made their move, running in a low crouch behind it, and using its trailer as cover to take them inside the perimeter as a sleepy-eyed guard waved it through.

Safely inside, Lock found a narrow gap between two stacks of blue and red shipping containers, and Mendez sat down with his back to one. The yard’s security was minimal — the guard on the gate and one more inside. No casual crew of thieves would touch any of the containers: it was all too likely that they would pick one being run by the cartels, and the price for that kind of mistake was death. No cop would be allowed inside to check the containers either, not without a warrant. There was too much risk that they would find something they shouldn’t, something they couldn’t turn a blind eye to.

In the near distance, Lock could see America through a gap in the newly erected border fence. But they weren’t going anywhere. Not yet, anyway.

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