Jim Bergin’s truck slowed to a stop twenty yards away on the taxiway, but he stayed inside.
“Step out of the airplane,” she commanded. The door popped, and she moved to her left, putting the strut and door between her and the boy. “Put both hands where I can see them.” He did so, hesitantly, one foot showing below the door. Estelle held the gun in both hands, watching the boy over the sights. “Step out of the airplane with your hands on top of your head, Hector.”
The second foot appeared, and the youth slid down from the cockpit. He closed the door gently with both hands, and then turned to face Estelle. He laced his fingers on top of his head, and stepped to one side to avoid the wing strut.
“Stop there,” she ordered. Hector was dressed in blue jeans and a colorful short-sleeved shirt, and he looked smaller than she remembered. His knees quaked and he almost staggered before regaining his balance. “Face down on the ground,” Estelle ordered, and when he hesitated, she commanded in Spanish, “¡Al suelo, boca abajo!” Instantly, he sank to his knees, one hand reaching out toward the Cessna’s wing strut for balance. “¡Al suelo!” she repeated, and he sagged forward on his stomach on the cold concrete. “¡Extiende los brazos!” When he was down and spread-eagled, and she could see both hands and both feet, Estelle moved toward him, shifting the gun to one hand.
“I speak English,” Hector shouted, his voice now shaking.
“I know you do,” Estelle replied. “No te muevas.” Not only would he speak English, but he would be familiar with police tactics in his home state. There were only two alternatives to obeying police commands-a savage beating or a bullet. She had seen his fear in his quaking knees.
Slipping the cuffs out of her belt, she advanced on him from behind. “Pone una mano detrás de la espalda,” she ordered, and seeing the speed at which he complied, wondered if he had considerable practice. In deft movements, she snapped the cuffs on his wrist. “La otra,” she said, and secured both hands.
“Up now,” she said, and applied some force while he scrambled awkwardly to his feet. She let him lean against the aircraft’s fuselage behind the wing.
“Mr. Ocate,” she said, her tone softening from the standard felony-stop commands. “Shopping for an airplane?”
He ducked his head and she saw his eyes flick toward the sound of an opening car door. Jim Bergin had stepped out of his vehicle, but he stayed well back.
“I…” Hector started to say, then fell silent. She waited for a full minute before he added, “I was deciding.” He started to shift his weight forward, but Estelle reached out and with three fingers against the center of his chest pushed him back against the airplane, keeping him off-balance.
“Deciding what, joven?” Estelle glanced at her watch. The boy had had plenty of time to make good his flight. Something had made him hesitate. Had he been sitting in the hangared plane with the door open, he could have heard her car hurtling toward the airport, hitting the gravel so fast she had almost slid into the fence. He had hit the ignition just about the time she had been fumbling with the lock on the gate.
The teenager took a long shuddering breath and closed his eyes for a moment.
“Three-oh-eight is thirty out,” Bob Torrez’s voice crackled from Estelle’s handheld radio. Estelle pulled the radio off her belt.
“Three-ten copies. We’re at the end of the taxiway. One juvenile in custody.”
“Ten-four.” Torrez sounded almost disappointed. Even as he spoke, they could hear his county vehicle approach on the state highway, then slow and turn onto the gravel access road.
As if the arrival of reinforcements was what he had been waiting for, Hector Ocate looked plaintively at Estelle. “I had decided that I could fly home,” he said. He turned and nodded toward the cockpit of the Cessna. “He must have insurance, no? I thought to fly to the airport at Culiacán. Do you know of that place?”
“And then?”
“I could leave the airplane there. Perhaps it could be recovered. It is easy. I fly right down the highway.” He looked out the door toward the San Cristóbal Mountains to the southwest. “Just there. That’s all. No one would care.”
“And then?” Estelle repeated.
“Just home,” Hector said.
“Where’s that?”
“A small village…some distance south of Acapulco.”
Hector stood a little straighter, and his voice took on an urgency that hadn’t been there before. “You must help me,” he said, and Estelle looked at him in surprise. “Please.”
“Help you?”
“That is what I decided. That you must help me.”
“Ah. It didn’t look that way, joven. Flying away in someone’s airplane isn’t asking for help.”
“I know now,” he said, nodding vigorously. “If I go home, he will find me again. And there, no one will help me.” The white Expedition roared down the taxiway, and for a moment it appeared as if Sheriff Robert Torrez was planning to rear-end Jim Bergin’s pickup. He swerved around it at the last minute, took to the grass, and stopped a dozen feet in front of Estelle’s sedan.
Estelle reached out again, hand on the boy’s chest. She saw Ocate’s eyes flick first to Bergin, then to the sheriff, and then back again. “It is possible that you can help me,” he said with finality. “And you must. That is the only way. That is why I didn’t take this airplane just now.”
“You didn’t take it because you would have crashed into my car, Hector. Don’t take us for fools. Who are you running from?” Estelle asked, and once more she saw Hector Ocate’s eyes flick back down the taxiway, past the airport manager and the sheriff, to the open hangar door as if he expected someone else to appear.
“Please,” the teenager pleaded.
“We won’t let anyone hurt you,” she said. “Will you talk with me?”
“Not here, please,” Hector said. The boy’s eyes were those of an injured rabbit watching the coyote circle ever closer. Sheriff Torrez approached without a word, grabbed the boy by the collar, and spun him around, pushing him hard against the airplane’s fuselage.
“Spread,” Torrez said, kicking his feet apart and back. The pat-down was anything but gentle or perfunctory. The boy looked back toward her, and she felt a stab of sympathy. To plead with police for protection had to be counter to all of Hector Ocate’s instincts, coming from a “guilty until proven innocent” culture where fairness was more often a function of the ability to pay the right people. Torrez’s rough handling was more familiar, and perhaps expected.
“Keys,” Torrez said, holding up a set of keys that included three-perhaps to the old man’s pickup and house. He pulled the boy’s wallet out of his back pocket and thumbed it open. “Well now,” he said, and held it so Estelle could see the hefty wad of bills. Satisfied that there was nothing else, he spun the boy around. Hector shrank back against the plane. Torrez was a head taller, fifty pounds heavier, and ferociously calm. He held out the keys and wallet to Estelle. “You want to keep track of these?” He then thrust his hands in his pockets, regarded the shaking boy dispassionately. “How many times have you used this airplane?” he asked, his skepticism heavy.
“I caused no damage to it,” Hector said.
“Oh, and that clears everything up,” Torrez muttered.
“Please,” Hector said again, and he looked past Torrez to Estelle. “I have this.” He twisted, digging one of his thumbs behind his belt and pulling at the leather.
The belt looked expensive, with basket-weave tooling and a silver buckle. What was tucked inside the belt was far more valuable, no doubt.
“Yeah, I saw that,” Torrez said.
“Tell us what happened to your passengers,” Estelle said.