Private L.A. (Private 6)
“You’re making a big mistake,” Commandant Gomez snarled as he followed his colleague unsteadily inside the van.
“On your stomachs,” Justine said, making her voice hoarse and pointing her gun at them from the shadows.
Cruz climbed in after them, took their weapons, and emptied them of bullets as I slid the door shut. Cordova jumped into the front seat. Mo-bot started driving again.
“Nice easy pace,” Cordova said.
Cruz and I meanwhile threw zip-tie restraints around the men’s wrists and ankles. They reeked of tequila and sweat but showed surprisingly little fear when we sat them up.
“You’ll spend many years behind bars for this,” said Commandant Gomez in an angry, drunken tone. “If you’re lucky and I don’t kill you first.”
Cruz gagged them. I blindfolded them.
No one spoke during the drive. South of Guadalajara, near the town of El Zapote, Mo-bot turned off onto a two-track dirt road and bumped up it for several hundred yards next to a condemned building that we’d scouted earlier in the day. Sci pulled up in a second panel van.
Still wearing the skeleton masks, we got the two men from the van and took them inside what had once been a tool and die operation, using red-lensed flashlights to lead them through the debris that had been left behind. In a high-ceilinged space deep inside the structure, we sat the two men in chairs.
Cordova said, “We cut off the wristbands. But if you move, we will shoot you with your own guns, señores. Nod if you understand.”
Both men bobbed their heads. Cruz used a pocketknife to slit the ties. Sci set glasses of water in front of them as they undid their gags. The second the gags were off, Mo-bot threw a switch and high-intensity spotlights glared down on them.
Chapter 118
“WHAT IS THIS?” Chief Fox demanded, holding up an arm to block the light glaring into his bleary red eyes. “Who are you? What do you want?”
The state police commandant squinted into the light and demanded angrily, “Do you have any idea who the fuck we are?”
“Sí,” Cruz said. “We know who you are.”
“No,” Gomez insisted. “Do you really know who we are? And what will happen to you if you don’t release us?”
“His brother-in-law is a very powerful man,” Chief Fox said. “Listen to him, my friends. You don’t want to do this. We pay our dues. We are protected.”
“By who?” Cruz asked.
“De la Vega,” Fox said, almost boasting. “Antonio de la Vega.”
I felt a hand on my forearm, looked over at Cordova. We were behind the spotlights, still wearing our skeleton masks. He whispered in my ear, “De la Vega drug cartel. One bad hombre. Reclusive. Doesn’t like attention.”
“Even better,” I said, leaned over, repeated to Justine what Cordova had just told me, and finished with: “Have at them.”
Justine bro
ught a chair with her. She sat opposite the men, pulled off her mask.
Commandant Gomez recognized her, first incredulous but then filled with drunken rancor. “You will never leave México alive.”
“What is your relationship to Adelita Gomez, Commandant?” she asked.
The state police commandant’s head retreated toward his shoulders several inches, like a turtle drawing into its shell or a snake about to strike. “I don’t know no one by that name.”
“You don’t know Adelita?” Justine said, looking at him with great skepticism. “The Harlows’ nanny? From Guadalajara?”
“No,” Gomez said. “Never heard of this girl.”
Fox shook his head. “Guadalajara is a big place.”
I took that as my cue, turned and made a cutting motion across my throat, and saw a red light blink back in the shadows. Cordova took the commandant’s pistol from Cruz and ran the mechanism as he stepped out into the light, still wearing the long duster and the skeleton mask.