“Across the border!” she exclaimed. “But that’s hundreds of miles from here!”
“Which is why we have private planes,” he said with a roll of his eyes. “They’ll have a car for us at the landing strip. We do the job and fly right back.”
“Oh.”
“You really are dense, aren’t you?” he chided. “This place, Percell, is close enough to Dallas to make a perfect hub for placing our product where it isn’t likely to be discovered. I mean, the Everetts are very respected in the area. Nobody’s going on their land to look for drugs.”
She began to see the light, in a big way. “I get it,” she replied, trying to sound nonchalant, while inside she was slowly panicking.
She frowned. “Why doesn’t the boss go?” she asked.
“Because he’s known down there. He doesn’t want his name mentioned or they’ll up the price and we’ll lose money.”
“Oh,” she said.
He pulled out onto the road that led to a secluded landing strip, where a single-engine aircraft was waiting, along with a bored-looking man sitting under an umbrella in a lawn chair.
It wasn’t a long flight but Raines loved country-western music. He had it on his cell phone and maxed it to overcome the engine noise. To Josie, whose heart was in the classics, it was absolute misery but she had to keep her thoughts concealed. Also, he was a chain smoker. He did, at least, apologize for not being able to crack a window when she began coughing her head off. Not that he put out the cigarette...
“Do you have a birth certificate or a passport on you?” he asked suddenly after they’d landed at the hidden airstrip and jumped into a car to go across the road into Mexico at the border crossing.
“Hell of a time to ask,” she muttered as she pulled hers from her purse. “Lucky for you that I went to Barbados on my vacation two years ago.”
“Yeah. Lucky.”
He pulled out his own passport and passed both of them to the guard. He asked them a few questions, checked the boot, returned the passports and waved them through.
She put hers up. “How much farther?” she asked with pretended boredom.
“Not too far. It’s a bar in the first town we come to.”
“Another bar. Oh, joy. If only I drank.”
“You really don’t drink?” he asked.
“I really don’t. My stomach kills me if I touch anything alcoholic.”
“Gosh, I’d die if I couldn’t drink.”
She didn’t answer him. But she was memorizing the roads they’d taken, so she could pass them along to the bureau later.
He stopped at a dingy bar with a sign that looked as if it had been the victim of several bullets.
“This is the place,” he said. “You really don’t speak Spanish?”
She made a face. “I took French in high school, but I already forgot how to speak it. I never wanted to learn Spanish,” she lied, because she could read Spanish colonial history—in Spanish. She’d minored in it, in college. It helped her if Raines and his group didn’t know she was bilingual. They were more likely to talk about secretive things if they thought she only spoke English.
“That’s probably a good thing,” he said to himself. “Okay, let’s go in. He’s here.”
She wondered how he knew that, until she spotted a big new Lincoln parked in back along with two beat-up and rusted pickup trucks and a car that was obviously never going to be driven again.
Inside, the bar was dark and dirty. The floors were unswept and there were spider webs in the corners. A couple of old men lounged at the bar. There was a single man, in a suit, seated at a table near the back door. He looked up as they approached. He was tall and thin with thick black hair, perfectly styled, and a scarred face.
Raines greeted him in Spanish. He and Josie took a seat.
“This is my boss’s woman,” he lied to the suited man, in Spanish. “He insisted that I bring her, but she speaks no Spanish, so you need not be afraid to talk in front of her.”
“No Spanish, huh?” the tall man replied. He smiled at Josie and told her she was truly beautiful, and he was proud to meet her.
