Something for Nothing (13 page)

“Well,” Hano said. “Mostly it's been by car. We did have a guy who
did a flight for us a few months ago, though. But then he backed out. Or something happened, anyway. I'm not sure. But that's why Val was so glad you were up for it. ‘Cause driving isn't cutting it anymore.”

He took a big swallow of his margarita, and glanced again at the secretaries.

Martin nodded, drinking from his beer. He looked out at the street. Everyone walking along the sidewalk was attractive. Or that's how it seemed. Martin had heard that a lot of Hollywood stars actually lived up here in Santa Barbara, and he wondered if he might see one of them strolling by. Paul Newman, or Jane Fonda. That would be something.

“So you're all set, right?” Hano asked. “You've got the flight coordinates, or whatever you call it?”

“Yep,” Martin said. “I'm all set.”

“Okay,” Hano said. “Good. And you know they're gonna have a landing strip all set up, right? I mean, they've got lights and everything. So you can see it from the air. But the last guy was a little skittish about it—about landing in a field at night and everything. He was nervous. I don't know what he expected, but he didn't seem to like it.”

Martin shrugged, and forced out a little laugh. “I'm all right,” he said. “Honest. You don't have to worry about me.” And it was the truth: nothing about flying made him nervous. As for how he felt about what they were going to do once they'd landed, that was a different story. That scared the shit out of him, in fact. But flying and landing? Not a problem.

“Okay,” Hano said. “Great.” He motioned to the waiter, who was standing with his back against a stucco archway, watching people on the street. Maybe the waiter was looking for movie stars, too. Martin wanted to ask him if he'd ever served a drink to a famous star.

Martin looked at the two women at the far table, thinking they were a little too skinny and probably too tanned for his tastes. They were definitely Southern California rather than Northern California. He thought about some of his daughter's friends, the older ones who sat
out by the pool with her sometimes (a couple of them had seriously nice bodies; it was no joke). They'd sit out in the sun all day long. The tans looked better on them than on these women, though these women looked all right. His daughter's friends looked better because they were younger—that's all there was to it.

Hano reached out for his glass and downed his margarita. If Martin had done that, he'd have gotten a blinding headache instantly.

Hano leaned toward Martin, a little more serious now. “Listen,” he said. “If you can get us there and land the plane, it'll be fine. Think about it. All we have to do is land, say hello,
hola, cómo estás,
do the exchange, and then we're back in the air. We don't have to worry about some fucking cops or military guys pulling us over, maybe making us pay them a huge bribe, or hauling us in to some shithole Mexican jail and keeping us there until we come up with a million dollars. And we don't have to worry about running into trouble at the border. When you're flying,” he said, leaning back now in his chair and smiling, “there is no border. You know what I mean?”

He raised his drink to Martin and then to the women at the other table. One of them, the older one, raised her glass in return. She had a sly smile on her face.

“I mean, Jesus,” Hano said, turning back to Martin. “Flying—it couldn't be easier. This is gonna be a snap.”

T
HEY FLEW OVER
E
NSENADA
at about ten. It was easy to spot from the air: there were lots of lights from buildings and cars. After that, though, it was pitch dark, and it was hard to find Ramirez's ranch. But after fifteen minutes or so of flying and circling and checking his instruments, Martin finally spotted the two long rows of flaming, kerosene-soaked rags that Ramirez's guys had put out as makeshift nighttime landing markers. It was pretty dramatic, dropping the plane down toward the two lines of light, seeing the glare and smoke and then feeling the bumpy unevenness of the packed dirt as they bounced
and skidded along. Once beyond the flaming lights of the landing strip, it was absolute blackness, but he managed to taxi for about a hundred yards and then steer the plane back around and bring it to a stop somewhere in the middle of the rows of burning rags.

Sitting next to the eerie glow, Martin wondered if they were just waiting for some Mexican drug thug to come and start blasting away at them in the cockpit. He fought off the image in his head of the two of them riddled with bullets and slumped over in their seats. The windshield would be shattered and sprayed with blood, and blood would be draining out of them and covering the cockpit floor. If you got close enough, you'd be able to hear the droplets of blood dripping onto the soaked floor of the plane.
Drip, drop, plop.
It would be a mess, and maybe Ramirez's head honcho would get angry about it—the plane was valuable, and who wanted an airplane that had been shot up and sprayed with blood? Couldn't they have been killed outside the plane?

Part of his fear stemmed from what Hano had told him about the first couple of minutes after landing the plane—about what the drug guys would do to check them out. “They'll shine lights on us so that we can't see,” he said. “And some guys will be out there pointing guns at us. Rifles and shotguns, probably. So just be cool. Once they're sure we're not some DEA assholes trying to trick them, they'll be fine. Everything will be fine. But just sit tight until they know it's okay. Don't spook the natives.”

And Hano was right. A few seconds after he brought the plane to a stop, a blinding search light blasted through the windshield. And then two more lights, smaller, probably from big flashlights, were shined onto them through the side windows. It was incredibly disorienting, enough so that Martin barely noticed it when his cockpit door was yanked open and someone put the barrel of a rifle—or some kind of gun, anyway—against his head. He didn't look over, but he was aware that Hano's door had been pulled open as well, and that light was streaming in from that side of the plane.

“Come on out,” someone said to him. “Hands up high.” It was English,
but definitely spoken by a native Spanish-speaker. Or, Martin wondered in his confusion and fear, was it a native Mexican-speaker? “Come on,” the voice said again. “Move.”

Martin stepped down, and someone guided him by the arm, turning him back toward the plane. The light was still shining in his face, and he was almost completely blinded. “Put your hands out on the plane,” the same voice said. The gun was now poking him in the back.

He put out his hands and stretched forward, and then felt the cool metal of the Cessna on his two palms. He heard a brief exchange behind him, but it was in Spanish, and he didn't understand any of it. He wondered suddenly if Radkovitch spoke Spanish. Probably. Or maybe just French, and a little German. But he'd probably studied Spanish at some point, too, in the off chance that South American banking (or was it Central American banking?) ever took off in a meaningful way.

A couple of rough hands began to search him, probably for a weapon—and suddenly Martin realized that this might not be the start of a drug deal at all. This might, he thought, be the Mexican police, or even the military (was there a difference?). It occurred to him that Hano might be some sort of drug agent. Then, for the first time, he was genuinely scared. The hands ran along his legs, from his ankles up to his crotch and backside, and then all over his torso, his back, his armpits.

The air was cool and dry, but all around him it smelled of the kerosene lamps. As he stood there, his hands flat on the side of his plane and the man's hands brushing over him, insistent, he thought about Linda at home. She'd have the kids in bed, probably—or at least Peter would be in bed. Since Martin was gone, Sarah had probably negotiated with Linda to stay up late. Either that or she'd pretended to go to sleep, but was whispering into the phone she'd pulled from the study. She'd be hiding under her blankets, as if the darkness made her less audible, somehow, and the phone cord less visible as it stretched down the hallway. Martin knew that if the drug dealers told him he had one quick phone call before they shot him, his frantic attempts to phone home
would be in vain. Standing out there in the weirdly lit smoky redness of the dirt runway outside of Ensenada, a long phone line stretching from Ramirez's house, he'd dial, his finger trembling and his breath coming in quick, short gasps, but all he'd get would be a busy signal.

“Okay,” the voice behind him finally said. “Turn around.”

Martin let his hands slide off the plane. Turning to face his possible execution, all he wanted to do was close his eyes. But when he swung around to see who was there behind him, no one was pointing a gun at him. Instead, he saw a stocky man with horribly bad skin. He was wearing a nice maroon leather coat and shaking hands with Hano. They began talking to each other in Spanish. Huh. Hano really was fluent. Martin had never seen a nonnative speaker talk to someone in another language. It was kind of amazing. It was almost as if he were faking it, just letting a bunch of random sounds pour out of his mouth, the way a kid might if he were speaking a made-up language. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But here, of course, it was a real language, and this guy Hano was actually speaking it. How about that?

Martin noticed that a guy standing off to his left was holding a rifle of some sort, one with a handle on the bottom. He thought it was one of those lever-action jobs that he'd seen in various westerns. He wasn't sure. But he
was
sure that this was the gun that had been pointed at his head—held right up against his head, in fact.

“
Bueno,
” Hano said, finally. “
Podemos esperar. Ningún problema. Cualquier necesitas hacer
.”

The Mexican man nodded. And then, turning toward Martin, he stepped to the side, and with his left arm held out (like a matador, Martin couldn't help thinking), gestured toward a car that was parked about ten feet away. It was a slightly older model Mercedes sedan; it was hard to tell in the strange light, but it looked yellow, and maybe a bit faded. Martin looked over at Hano, who nodded and tilted his head toward the car, as if to say “Yes, it's fine, hop in.”

And so that's what Martin did. He started toward the car and got in after someone—not the guy with the cowboy rifle—opened the rear
door for him. The interior light flicked on as the door opened, and Martin saw that the car was clean inside. The leather seats were shiny and new looking, even though Martin knew that the car was at least five years old. A big fat guy was sitting at the wheel. He didn't turn around, but Martin exchanged a quick glance with him in the rearview mirror. A second later, Hano leaned down and started to climb into the car, so Martin slid over to the seat directly behind the driver.

The driver started the car, and then they were rumbling along over what seemed like a long stretch of hard, packed dirt. He couldn't see much at all (it was dark again now that they were away from the reddish glow of the oil lamps), but he knew they were whizzing along somewhere between forty and fifty miles an hour.

“So what's going on?” he finally said to Hano. “When do we load up the plane?”

Hano leaned back in his seat, stretched, and then yawned. “Well,” he said. “It sounds like . . . it turns out . . . they're waiting on their shipment. It's gonna be a day or two late.” He looked over at Martin, shrugged, and then turned to face forward.

Martin sat there for a second, processing what Hano had just said. “‘They're waiting on their shipment'?” he asked, echoing Hano. “What does that mean? We have to take off out of here pretty soon, don't we?”

Hano let out a little laugh. “We can't leave until we've got the dope,” he said. “And since it's not here, we've gotta wait.”

Martin stared over at the dark silhouette of Hano sitting there next to him. Then he glanced at the driver. But the guy was looking straight ahead, concentrating on the bumpy dirt road. Did he speak English—understand what they were saying? Probably.

Jesus Christ, Martin thought. He had assumed they were being taken over to Ramirez's main residence, where they'd sit in some sort of comfortable, distinctively Mexican living room. It would have a rustic, wood interior, with big beams overhead and Mexican rugs on the walls. They'd sit on a large, cushiony couch, and Ramirez's wife, or maybe a
sexy young servant (that Ramirez slept with from time to time) would serve drinks. The servant might lock eyes with Martin for a quick second, letting him know she found him attractive and interesting. Her look would imply that if he were brave enough, he should fly back and rescue her from her life of service in Mexico.

But they weren't heading for the hacienda. Instead, the car plunged into the night, the suspension rattling on the dirt road and its washboard ripples.

“So where are we going?” Martin asked into the darkness of the car. But Hano didn't respond, and suddenly the car felt incredibly quiet. The driver coughed, and then glanced at them in the mirror.

“Ensenada,” Hano said, finally. “It's only about half an hour away. We're going to stay the night there.” He looked again at Martin. His round face was barely visible in the darkness—really only a shadow. “Don't worry,” he said. “I had to do this once before. It's not a big deal. Their connect is just a little late coming up from the mountains. It's all the way from the Sierra Madre, you know.”

Martin felt a rising sense of panic. It was a little like one of those bad dreams—not quite a nightmare—in which you know you've got a rental car and it's overdue, but now you can't find it; you parked it somewhere but you can't quite locate the street, and because you're on foot, every wrong turn just takes up more time and energy. And then, once you do find the car, the tires have been stolen. And although you try to drive it anyway, the bare metal of the wheels grinding on the road makes this impossible. And then you're in a neighborhood you've never seen and the phones aren't working, and you're increasingly (incredibly) frustrated and also vaguely, indefinably sad. Why is this happening to me? you think in the dream. Why am I alone, and why won't anyone help me?