The Rescue

18

Strickland doesn’t get off Interstate 5 until he passes his exit for home, then stops in San Ysidro. He fills the Quattroporte’s tank with premium, pushes the cheese and protea flowers into the trash can, washes the windshield, and crosses the border into Tijuana.

Less than an hour later, he’s drinking a beer in the great room of Carlos Palma’s beachfront compound near Rosarito.

Through the enormous picture window, the sun is sinking into the Pacific. Orange ribbons on black water. Men with machine guns stroll the property, loiter in the arcade and gardens. There’s a helicopter draped with camouflage net not far from the swimming pool. And a private marina made of enormous boulders, in which a gunship bobs, the guns themselves stowed on board for secrecy and quick deployment.

Here in the gaudy, over-furnished great room that reminds Strickland of a Miami hotel, the muted big screen shows recorded fútbol.

Strickland knows that Palma is unusually old to be running the Tijuana plaza of the CJNG — the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Carlos was born in Veracruz, so he’s not just old, he’s a fish out of water. Midsixties; thick gray hair; a suspicious, doubting face. Strickland has seen cartel life eat its young members alive. Yet Palma soldiers on. His wife, Camille — svelte and beautiful — reclines in a bowl-shaped rattan chair on a pedestal, her legs crossed under a white linen dress.

The men weave back and forth between Spanish and English, Strickland nearly fluent after classes in high school and a semester of college, and living in Mexico months at a time. Palma is conversant after his years at San Diego State University, and nonstop American movies and TV here in Mexico

Palma listens intently as Strickland reveals the rumors about Sinaloans dispatched to Laguna Beach to deal with Joe.

“Deal with him in what way?”

“Not clear yet, but I imagine they’ll kill him.” Strickland feels the cold plunge of his heart. “Kill a dog, for Christ’s sake,” he says.

“I want Joe back to work as much as you do,” says Palma. “So, yes, if you want my men to steal him from the reporter, I can do this.”

“And protect her from the Sinaloans?”

“Yes. Why don’t you steal the dog yourself?”

“Joe is with the reporter twenty-four seven.”

Palma squints at Strickland. “I have Frank and Héctor in San Diego. They are my best Californians. But you should know that this is an expense and a risk.”

“I think Joe’s worth it, for our business,” says Strickland. “Thank you, Carlos.”

“But while we try to claim your Joe and protect this reporter, we must get back to work. We are losing opportunity. We have good intel but no good dog.”

“Benjamin has good dogs,” says Camille. She’s got the face of a princess and the wary eyes of a street fighter. Strickland knows she’s from Hermosillo, daughter of a supervisor in the Ford Factory. Palma and his lieutenants always have new Fords but Camille hasn’t gotten her license, though she just turned nineteen. Strickland knows that old Palma doesn’t want her going anywhere.

“He will give me any dog you wish,” she says.

“I don’t trust him,” says her husband.

“He’s a good friend.”

“Then I trust him less.”

Strickland has observed a few dogs trained by Palma’s men — three pit bulls and a Malinois — and found them unprofessional and churlish, more interested in fighting than finding drugs and money. There is no comparing them to Joe in either skill or spirit.

Palma speaks into a remote, and the TV fútbol becomes boxing. Strickland watches a series of lavish knockouts going back decades — a highlights reel apparently curated by Palma himself.

Strickland watches the colors play off the faces of Palma and Camille, burnished by the glow of the setting sun.

The boxing becomes cockfighting, staged atrocities that Strickland can hardly watch. Strickland has always hated cockfighting.

Then bullfighting, which he’s always hated even more.

Palma senses Strickland’s mood and gives him a cagey glance. Speaks into the remote. The TV shows Bettina Blazak and Dr. Rodríguez at the Saint Francis of Assisi Veterinary Clinic in Tijuana.

Strickland is startled by this sudden, larger-than-life image of her, by the zoomed-in details, her hopeful eyes, the dark waves of hair breeze-blown in the cloudy gray day.

Palma stares at him, eyes magnified by his black-framed glasses. “Have you talked to her?”

“I drove to her office as soon as I saw her video.”

“My Frank and Héctor will move quickly.”

“That’s what I’m hoping. Carlos, make it absolutely clear that they cannot hurt her.”

“Do you like her face?” asks Camille.

“Not particularly, señora.”

At Palma’s command, the TV now offers dogfights, bloody spectacles that Strickland ignores in favor of the darkening western sky. The sun dips into the ocean while in the periphery of his vision writhing forms thrash in silence.

“Señor Strickland, you and Joe have made me money,” says Carlos. “And humiliated the Sinaloans. It was your idea. To work for New Generation. And I thank you for bringing your idea to me.”

“Yes, sir,” answers Strickland, sensing bad news. He remembers that first precarious meeting with Palma, brokered by one of Strickland’s Apex Self-Defense clients — a wealthy Mexican resort developer with a love of horse racing. Everybody knew that Carlos Palma owned stables. Back then — just over a year ago — Palma had seemed smart and businesslike. He had taken Strickland’s outrageous proposal to use his exceptional dog to find Sinaloan loot with a dark sense of humor and a glimmer in his eye.

No humor in him now, Strickland sees, just business. He begins to admit how foolish he was to think his relationship with Palma could lead to trust and friendship. How foolish it was to reveal his real name, his real history.

Palma fingers the remote and in the window reflection, dogfighting turns to human pornography.

“So, I will return Joe to you so that we can continue our important work,” he says. “But now I find it necessary that we change our arrangement. My risks grow higher as the Sinaloans send in men from the mountains. And my costs grow higher as I bribe the Policía Municipal for our freedoms here.”

“Carlos? Change our arrangement?”

“You are a businessman. You surely see this.”

“I see that I am about to be robbed.”

Strickland turns and sees the TV obscenities flickering on Palma’s dark glasses.

Then pivots back to the window and looks down at Rosarito, the hotels and restaurants, their lights twinkling like jewels. Two men with guns slung over their shoulders look up at him from the arcade. He’s never wanted out of somewhere more than here, right now, once and forever.

“Daniel,” says Palma. “I have paid you thirty percent of what Joe has found — of the money and the products. Now, I am asking you to work with a new dog until we get your dog back. And, to accept twenty percent, as a way of supporting the New Generation Tijuana Cartel against the Sinaloans. Against the world. We are like the Corleones. A family against the wicked and the corrupt.”

Palma speaks into the remote again and The Godfather starts up, a man’s face in the darkness:

I believe in America...

“Take the new arrangement,” says Camille, not moving her eyes from the screen. “It will guarantee that Bettina Blazak is protected. You surely see this too.”

Strickland nurses a glass of wine through dinner in the formal dining room. Conceals his lifelong indifference to alcohol with colorful stories of his time in Sangin Valley, Afghanistan; learning Krav Maga from badass Israelis in Tel Aviv; his headline-making rescue of the congressman in the restaurant assassination attempt. What he wants most in life right now is to kick the shit out of the old man and get back to San Diego. But if he leaves now, proud, vain, pathetic Palma will take it as an insult.

After dinner, they all return to the great room for cigars and brandy and more TV entertainment.

Strickland agrees to his new pay scale.

Agrees to audition three more of Benjamin’s miserable dogs.

Professes his fierce loyalty to New Generation and makes another earnest request that Joe be abducted safely, and the Coastal Eddy reporter be spared violence from either side.

Palma tells him that Frank and Héctor are honorable men, and not to worry so much.

Later, awash in tequila and red wine, growing sentimental about his native Veracruz, where he plans to retire, Palma falls asleep on the cowhide couch, his head lolled back on a cushion and muted Scarface scenes playing off his glasses.

Camille leaves the room without a word or a look.

Strickland goes to the big window again and looks out at the heaving sea. Faint music drifts to him from somewhere deep in the house.

Strickland sees himself as a man who has never hesitated to take what he wants, never wavered in the face of acceptable risk, never cowered from threat or danger. He eats such things for lunch. But here right now, in this gangster’s compound by the sea, he feels fear as never before. It’s not from something out there, coming at him. It’s gotten inside, pushing away the adrenaline, coloring his thoughts. He thinks part of it might be the three men he shot down in the Calderón factory and warehouse. They fall through his dreams. He’s seen this same fear in his students at Apex, especially in the fighting rings, that knee-wobbling, heart-pounding shutdown of confidence that turns scared humans into easy targets.

He box-breathes for a minute, feels his pulse slow down and the fearful static in his mind begin to quiet.

Glances back at snoring Palma, at his slipped eyeglasses and slack mouth, which strike Strickland as the perfect rewards for human lust and vanity. He wonders if that could be him someday, decides it most certainly could. Wonders if he would regret his life. And admits now that he would probably regret all but a few relatively minor moments of it. The rest just meaningless pursuit of things. Reflex, distraction.

He feels himself changing and isn’t sure he likes it.

He looks through his reflection on the window glass, all the way to the dim line where the twinkling black ocean meets the dull black sky.

These sudden notions of fear and regret are new to Strickland, and they gnaw at him.

But what’s bothering him just as much is Bettina Blazak and his unprecedented desire to give her what he has. All he has. His protection, attention and consideration. His words and emotions. His past; his stories. His occasional smiles and laughter. All his cool stuff, all the things he’s collected from all the places he’s been. And, of course, there might also be things they’d acquire and the places they’d see, together. All they would make together. He wonders for the thousandth time what exactly has been happening to him since he first watched her Felix video online and saw his Joe in the company of a beautiful bright woman who reminded him of someone, or some thing. He’s never used the word love in any but the most mundane way, and never regarding a whole, fellow, human being. I love a rare ahi steak. I love the way the Quattroporte grabs the road and won’t let go. I love the smell of money and the things it can buy. I love her legs.

So when Strickland tries to solve himself, he sees that fear plus regret equals his desire to give. Not to take. To give. That is love, correct? To give all.

He remembers asking the same of Bettina Blazak:

All you offer.

He feels a cold shudder down his back as he considers the “honorable” Frank and Héctor. Has he loosed the hounds of hell on Joe and Bettina? Or found the most expedient available way to keep her and Joe from being harmed by the Sinaloans, and getting Joe returned to his rightful owner?

The light from the TV suddenly changes. Strickland turns to find the fútbol on again and Camille in a green satin robe, her sleek black hair up, regarding him. She looks empty and exhausted.

She sets the remote on the couch and walks out, glancing back at Strickland before heading into a dark hallway.

Back home, Strickland sends a text message to Bettina Blazak’s Coastal Eddy number: