I walked past the car along the driveway. I followed the curve up and up until I found a Ford Taurus with California plates parked beside a van. It looked as if the van blocked the line of sight from the nearest security camera. I knelt and used the flat tongue of my belt buckle to remove the plates. I carried them back to the rental car, got in, and drove to the exit. There, I handed the parking chit to the man in the booth and paid the amount that flashed on the small screen. When he handed me a receipt, I checked the date printed there and saw it had been four days.
On a side street several blocks away from the airport, I parked at the curb, got out, and switched the plates. I threw the rental plates onto a pile of trash bags and drove on. I found an OXXO convenience store and pulled over. I went in and bought a blue-and-silver Dallas Cowboys gimme cap, a pair of full-frame reading glasses from a revolving stand that also displayed sunglasses, and the fattest cigar they had. I also bought another prepackaged sandwich, some more chips, and a bottle of tea for the caffeine.
Ten minutes later I pulled to the end of the half-mile-long line at the border crossing and settled in to wait. There were five or six other lanes of cars, thousands of us inching toward the USA while people strolled between the lanes selling ceramic turtles, sodas, deep-fried pastries called churros, bags of peanuts, chewing gun, and piñatas in all shapes.
It took two hours to roll that last half mile to the border. When only two vehicles remained between me and the US Customs booth, I put on the reading glasses and the gimme cap. I also unwrapped the cigar and stuck it in my mouth, pushing it back so it filled out my cheek on the left side, where the customs cameras that were focused on drivers would be.
The car in front of me moved on. The light turned green. I rolled up to the customs booth.
“Passport and driver’s license, please,” said the border guard.
I handed them to him.
“Where have you been today, Mr. Carver?” asked the guard.
I did my best to talk around the cigar. “Down at Ensenada. I was looking at a little condo.”
“You planning to buy?”
“Thinking about it.”
“You know about the drug cartels, don’t you?”
“Yeah. But the place is cheap. ʼSides, I figure they won’t bother me if I don’t bother them.”
The guard shook his head. He compared my open passport to something on the computer screen beside him in the booth. He said, “Do you have any fruits or vegetable products with you?”
“No, sir.”
“Where are you from?”
“Originally, Salina, Kansas, but I live in LA now.”
He stared hard at me. I chewed on the cigar and waited.
He closed the passport and gave it back to me, along with the driver’s license. “You should think a little more about that condo, Mr. Carver. These cartels down here aren’t fooling around.”
“Thanks,” I said, taking the documents. “I will.”
An hour and a half later, I pulled off the highway in San Clemente and passed a gas station with a pay phone. I wasn’t carrying a cell phone. Cell-phone locations can be traced. I drove a little farther to park the car out of the gas station’s camera range and then got out and walked back to the phone. I called Teru and told him where I was. I dropped the cap and glasses and cigar in a Dumpster beside the station, then walked back to the car, got inside, and went to sleep.
Sometime later I awoke to the sound of Teru tapping on the driver’s-side window. I put the rental-car keys behind the visor, got out, locked the door, and closed it.
When we were in Teru’s Porsche, he said, “So?”
“Remind me to call the rental people tomorrow about where we left that car.”
“Did you find Vega?”
“He found me.”
“And?”
“I’m not completely sure yet.”
I told him everything that had happened.
When I was done, he said, “I still don’t know what’s going on, do you?”
“Maybe it’ll make more sense after I’ve had some sleep.”
The next morning I woke up thinking about being served Simon’s french roast coffee in bed, but apparently now that Sid Gold was in residence, my days of being buttled were over. I made my own coffee. I heated a couple of frozen waffles, spread some butter on them, and smothered them in maple syrup, and then took them and the coffee outside to the patio. When I was done eating, I promised myself to start paying more attention to my diet. Then, since the police search had left the guesthouse in a shambles and Simon had done nothing about it, I spent several hours putting everything back in place. It was a hard thing, not being buttled, but it was better to have been buttled and lost, than never to have been buttled at all.
Simon dropped by around noon with a large brown paper sack in his hands. We had lunch together on the patio. From the paper sack he withdrew Cobb salad and tomato bisque, a couple of chilled bottles of Perrier, and yet another M11 semiautomatic. Simon had used maple-smoked bacon in the salad, and Bleu de Gex instead of Roquefort cheese. He told me Sid Gold was going to work out fine. Even his children seemed all right, although with teenagers, you could never tell.
I removed the sidearm from the holster and checked the action. “Have you hired a housekeeper?”
“I am still interviewing applicants,” he said. “But I engaged a woman from a temporary agency in the interim.”
“Can she cook?”
“Tolerably, although should Mr. Gold desire to entertain formally, I believe we would turn to a caterer for a more sophisticated bill of fare.”
I ejected the magazine, checked the load, and replaced it. I put the weapon in the holster and clipped the holster to my belt. “How’s Sid handling the divorce?”
“I overheard him weeping in the library yesterday.”
“Well, at least you’re making his life simpler.”
“Indeed.” Simon nodded. “There is that.”
“Has his wife come by?”
“From what Mr. Gold has mentioned, I believe she has no plans to visit.”
“Women can be hard to understand.”
“That has also been my experience.”
“Were you ever married?”
“Briefly, quite some time ago.”
“An English girl?”
“No. I met her in the Philippines. She passed away.”
“I’m sorry.”
“As I mentioned, it was quite some time ago. One does move on.”
“Really? How?”
He turned his pale gray eyes toward me. “One finds a way, if one is wise.”
We ate silently for a while. The soup was extraordinary.
Finally I said, “Thanks for the gun.”
“My pleasure.”
“Olivia Soto is Alejandra Delarosa’s daughter.”
“Is she indeed?”
“She is. The case files I was given only mention the Delarosa’s daughter by her first name, Maria. It turns out her full name is Maria Olivia Delarosa Sotomayor. What do you make of that?”
He took a bite of salad and chewed for a moment. “She is working for the Delarosa woman’s victim. For her mother’s victim. That is concerning.”
“It is.”
“But has she broken any laws?”
“Not that I know of. It’s not illegal to use an assumed name, except on contracts and so forth. And she was born in Los Angeles according to the file, so she’s an American citizen, not here illegally.”
Simon said, “There’s the woman Mrs. Montes saw during the home invasion.”
“Doña Elena seems pretty certain that was Alejandra Delarosa.”
“Family resemblance? Dim lights? Extreme stress?”
“It had crossed my mind.”
“One thinks of reporting this to the authorities or of warning Mrs. Montes directly. But given your current situation and the fact that you left Orange County to obtain this information, perhaps it would be best to gather more intelligence before taking that step.”