Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller [116]
“Two bodyguards,” Hy corrected her. “Fontes has two.” Obviously Tomás or someone else at the riverbed had been able to help him.
“One’s with him in Mexico City.”
“Okay,” I said, “we’re dealing with the one bodyguard, Salazar, and Jaime. Anybody else on the premises?”
“The cook and the maid don’t live in. The maid brought some ice into the living room about half an hour before I came outside; she said they were both going home.”
“What about the bartender?”
“Just somebody who comes in when Fontes has people over.”
“Salazar didn’t bring anybody with him but Jaime?”
She shook her head.
“Okay, give us some idea of the layout of the villa—where Mourning’s being held, where everybody else is sleeping.”
Navarro began to talk, describing the rooms and various locations. She and Salazar were in the wing that looked like a bell tower; the others were in the shorter wing at the opposite end of the house. Mourning’s room was on the ground floor between those of the bodyguards, while Jaime slept directly upstairs.
Hy asked, “Is there a security system?”
“Not that I know of.”
“And have all the others gone to bed?”
“I think so, but you never know with Salazar. He prowls.”
Hy’s mouth twisted wryly and he touched his left arm. “I’m painfully aware of that.” He glanced across Navarro at me. “I’d better check it out with the camera.”
“Okay.” I watched him move toward the path to the beach.
His departure made Navarro nervous, as if she feared me more than him. She looked away to her right, shredding what remained of the slip of paper with Viner’s number on it. When I used the automatic controls to raise her window and lock her door, she started.
I asked, “Will Salazar go looking for you if he finds you’re not where he left you?”
“I doubt it. So long as my car’s still there, he’ll think I’ve gone to bed.”
“Will he check your room?”
“It wouldn’t do him any good. I’ve kept it locked the whole time I’ve been here, even when I wasn’t in there.” She reached into her pocket and showed me a key.
“Just how doped up is Tim?”
She considered. “He was mobile, but pretty spaced out earlier today. They probably knocked him out for the night, though.”
I tried to picture rescuing a heavily drugged man from the guarded house. A seemingly impossible task. And then there was the problem of moving him across the border once we got to Tijuana. The coyote, Al Mojas, might balk at the increased danger. I supposed we could hole up somewhere in the border city, make our move the next night when Mourning would be more alert, but I didn’t like that, either. Every additional minute we spent in Baja could be fatal.
Of course, there was La Procuraduría de Protección al Turista—the Attorney General for the Protection of the Tourist. Wasn’t that the agency all the guidebooks told you to contact if you had legal trouble down here? Oh, sure. La Procuraduría probably lived in Fontes’s hip pocket; Gilbert would be waiting on its doorstep to welcome us. Besides, Mexico’s judicial system operates on the Napoleonic Code: you’re guilty until proven innocent. And we were about to be guilty as hell of breaking into Fontes’s villa.
To take my mind off all the possible pitfalls, I decided to clear up some details that had been bothering me. I asked Navarro, “You were holding Tim at your house near Blossom Hill?”
“… Yes. We didn’t … treat him badly.”
Even though you intended to kill him later. “How did Fontes figure out where he was?”
“Diane let it slip. She drinks, and when she drinks, she talks too much.”
“Didn’t it make you suspicious of Fontes’s intentions when Jaime brought Tim here last night?”
“How do you know all this?”
“You’ve been under surveillance for quite some time now.”
“Oh. Well … yes, at first I wondered, but then Gilbert took me aside and explained that he felt it’d be safer for all of us to be down here in Baja. He pays protection to the federal police, you see. It made sense, and besides, I’d been worried about Tim. He was alone with nobody to look after him. At first I planned only