The Rescue

41

The Sierra Madre Occidental is as forbiddingly beautiful as when Bettina saw it five years ago with a girlfriend — a college graduation gift from Mom and Dad. These rugged mountains are drier than her Sierra Nevada back in California, boulder strewn and not so green. Massive canyons and far horizons. The oaks and elms lean and twist. The red-barked manzanitas send their gnarled roots down through the rocks. Pines struggle up through the granite. A tougher world here, she thinks. She watches a Copper Canyon vintage Pullman train like the one she’d taken, gliding into a mountainside tunnel like an enormous steel snake, lit by the setting sun.

She steers the rental Chevy through the steepening switchbacks behind Los Mochis. Strickland sits beside her, regarding the fading orange evening through sunglasses, his Padres cap tipped low. From a friend in San Blas, Strickland has managed to obtain a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol and shells, which is now in the glove compartment under which Strickland’s knees barely fit. Bettina had watched him lift the rag-shrouded weapon from a rusted steel trash can behind a Pemex station, a cold chill running down her back.

With a nod to Mexican propriety, they take adjacent rooms at the rustic Creel Lodge. After dinner they retire to the nearly empty lobby and sip tequila under an immense, cascading chandelier of deer antlers. The fireplace burns hard against the cold Sierra night.

Strickland pokes the logs and adds another, then returns to his pine-and-cowhide chair and takes her hand.

“How are you feeling, Bettina?”

“Eager to see my dog. Anxious that I won’t get a good story on Godoy. Afraid that something will go wrong. My nerves chilled when I saw what you did at the Pemex station. I thought: a gringo in Mexico is euthanasia.”

“That’s a bit of an exaggeration, Carlos.”

“In the heart of Sinaloa? Maybe not.”

The fire crackles and throws light onto the antlers massed above them.

“I have a favor to ask,” says Strickland. “Don’t shoot any pictures or video of me tomorrow.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to be seen down here. It could be misconstrued.”

Which strikes Bettina as mysterious, maybe paranoid. By whom, she wonders, the cops he says he knows, on both sides of the border?

“No pics. No video. You have my word.”

“Thank you.”

She squeezes his hand. “It’s so much colder here than I remember.”

“It’s still March,” says Strickland. “Twenties at night. That’s a good strong fire.”

“What if my story flops? What if Godoy freezes up on camera? What if Felix has been abused or doesn’t want to come home with me?”

“With us,” he says.

“Us. He’s still mine.”

Strickland’s hand is strong and dry. She appreciates his calm. She wonders if he maybe doesn’t have her Polish-German-Irish spark, which turns to flame and becomes her fire. Maybe he’s got cool water instead of sparks, she thinks. Cool water that turns to frost, then ice. And the ice allows him to go forward, overcome fear and take risks, just like her fire does. Two different natures. Two different ways of getting to the same place.

“I don’t see you as anxious and afraid,” he says.

“It’s not often,” she says. “But when it hits, it’s hard to shake. I’m prone to dread at three in the morning. I wake up afraid of everything. Hours go by. I can’t sleep and every idea is a bad idea. Everything is doomed.”

Bettina sips her tequila. Strickland has barely touched his.

“I picture you blasting the Escalade,” he says. “Setting that boy straight. Or riding a wave. Or chasing the dognappers down the street with your scattergun.”

“I hope I’m not just hot-tempered and stupid.”

Bettina catches his minor smile. “Shut up,” she says quietly. “All I want out of all of this is my dog.”

“May I knock on your door later?”

“No. I want my own bed and body tonight.”

“I want them too.”

“Soon.”

Strickland lies on his bed in the dark, blankets heaped against the cold and the wall heater glowing feebly.

He’s having trouble believing how profoundly his life has changed since meeting Bettina Blazak at the Coastal Eddy in Laguna not even two weeks ago.

Nothing is the same.

Nothing feels real though he knows it is.

He’s in love with her for starters, an emotion absent from all his thirty-three years.

He’s pledged his hard-earned skills and his life to protect her, paying Godoy a hefty $250,000 to secure her safety. The money didn’t break him but it did sting, Strickland being a lifelong penny-watcher excepting guns, cars, and motorcycles.

He’s told her things about himself he’s never told another human being.

He’s had sex with her, feeling different, and more strongly, than with anyone before.

He regrets his lies and trickery.

But more important than any of that, Strickland is giving Joe to her. It pains him, but his generosity feels whole and good. He’ll get to visit. To Strickland there’s nothing more generous a person can do than give up their dog.

Now we’re here in the perilous Sierra Madre, he thinks, and his feet are cold and he can’t sleep and there’s just one wall between them.

He reaches one hand into the cold air, sets his palm against that plaster wall and wonders if Godoy will betray them.

The battered .45 and eight shells are all he has to protect them here in the beating heart of the Sinaloa Cartel.

So he prays, for the first time in his life, to a God he’s never believed in. Even this feels different, feels true and real for the first time.

Feels his old light dimming and his new bright light burning strong.