7.

I DIDN’T CALL AHEAD on my burner phone because maybe the doc wouldn’t want to see me; I had brought him enough misery.

So my plan was to just show up, though I stopped a few times on the way there for gas and food and to keep the two men alive. I gave them water and hand-fed them beef gorditas, which I had picked up at a roadside stand, and they accepted the nourishment: all the fight had gone out of both of them. It was hard work being tied up in a trunk, hours on end, maybe even fatal, but it was important to me that they not die. I wanted the doctor to determine their fate, and we pulled into Casa Feldman around ten o’clock at night.

By that point, I was practically hallucinating with fatigue—it had been a hideous twenty-four hours, even by the violent standards of my life—and I parked in front of the main house of the old hunting lodge. There were no lights on, and no lights on in any of the cabins, but the doctor’s pickup truck was there, and I figured that he and his wife and the nurses were all asleep.

I didn’t like waking them, but I wasn’t going to wait till morning, and with the headlights of the Lincoln lighting the way, I went to the front door and knocked loudly. I waited but there was no response, and I knocked again. Then I noticed that the dogs, who lived outside in a shed, with old blankets on the floor, didn’t come running. Something was off, so I tried the knob of the front door—it wasn’t locked—and let myself in.

The lights from the car, coming through the open door, partially illuminated the front area of the house, which was half sitting room, half dining room.

There was a smell in the air, and I called out, “Doctor, are you home?”

But there was no response—the place felt empty of life. I reached for a light switch on the wall, flipped it up, and off to the left, there they were, all lined up on the floor, like dead soldiers after a battle: the doctor, his wife, his son, and the two elderly nurses.

And they each had a bullet hole in the center of the forehead.

They had been shot the same way as Felix, the mechanic, with a .22, point-blank. I could tell because the holes were relatively small, and that’s what .22s are for: execution work, up close, and that was the kind of gun Venturi carried.

I walked over to the bodies to get a closer look, and the doctor’s eyes were still open, but all the things he had seen were now lost to the world.

How naive I had been. The twenty-five thousand dollars in the money belt. Why else would Poole be carrying that much cash in Mexico? Before coming to Dos Ballenas, he and Venturi must have been paid by the Sinaloa for offing the doctor and his family, delayed retribution for Diablo, and then when they bagged me, they’d collect another twenty-five K.

But Kunian’s offer of seventy-five K to drag me back to the States, before whacking me, had been too good to pass up. And so they had hoped to make seventy-five off Kunian, plus twenty-five from the Sinaloa… double-dipping.

No law against it, Poole had said on the phone to Kunian.

I left the bodies and went back to the car and reclined the seat, needing to think, to collect myself. George and Walter crawled all over me, loving me, which gave me strength.

Then I got out of the car and popped the trunk, which had an interior light.

Felix was still very dead, and my two hostages were unconscious. I got a bottle of water and threw it on them, and they sputtered awake.

I said, half sane, “Is there anyone who loves you?”

I had the half cocked idea that if they were loved that maybe I should somehow spare them, but they looked at me blankly. Then Venturi said, “Please, mister, let us out. I can’t feel my arms. I can’t feel anything. Please.”

It was eerily regressed, him calling me mister. He was completely Stockholmed and broken, and I said, “Don’t worry, I’m thinking about what to do with you.”

Poole whispered, hoarsely, “Where are we?”

“Near Tijuana,” I said, and they, of course, had no idea where I had taken them: the dark forest around us was quiet and a bit chilly, and the only lights in the woods were the Lincoln’s headlights shining on the house and the little trunk light shining on the three men: two dying, one dead.

“Let us go,” said Poole. “We’ll never look for you. I promise.”

Of course he was lying. They would look for me day and night, but I said, “Okay. I won’t kill you. I promise. You just have to give me some more information.”

“What more can I tell you?”

Well, there were a few things that came to mind, and in the glove compartment, I found a pen and an old handbook for the Lincoln. I took that back out to the trunk and opened the book so I could write everything down on the blank inside cover. Then I asked Poole and Venturi for the following items: the passcodes to their phones and the passwords to their bank accounts, linked to the ATM cards in their wallets.

They obediently gave me everything, and then I asked them where Kunian lived, and they didn’t know, but they knew where he worked. He owned a strip club in Riverside, called Diamond Dancers, and they said he was there all the time. The place was a laundry for the Jalisco Cartel, and Poole said Kunian still worked for the Jaliscos, cleaning their money and distributing product, even after what they had done to him: cutting off his hands for stealing.

“Nice people to work for,” I said, and the final thing I wanted from these two was information about the service in Tijuana that Poole had mentioned on the phone to Kunian, the service that could get people across the border: I needed to know how it worked.

Clinging to hope, they didn’t hold anything back, and I wrote it all down. When they finished spilling, I closed the book and said, “This has been very helpful. Now, what’s going to happen is, I’m not going to kill you, like I promised. I’m trying not to do that anymore, but I am going to close this trunk and leave you here and maybe you can figure a way out. I know this seems cruel… and it is… But think about all the things you have done that have led to this moment. That’s your karma coming to fruition, and if you somehow survive, which would also be your karma, never do those things again. Because if you do, you will have even worse karma. I know that’s hard to imagine. But it’s how things work.”

I reached up then to close the trunk, and this wasn’t at all a Buddhist solution, but I was more endarkened than enlightened, more nuts than sane, and Poole, his face falling apart, looking like the little boy I had envisioned earlier in the day, said, “Please don’t do this. Please.”

It was unsettling, his face shattering like that, revealing the child buried within, and it gave me pause. Then I looked at Venturi, who simply closed his eyes and couldn’t even summon the energy to beg: he was done.

“Please,” said Poole, again. “Please.”

“You shouldn’t have killed the mechanic,” I said. “You shouldn’t have killed the doctor and his family.”

Poole’s eyes widened—I had caught him in another lie—and he saw the silhouettes of the trees behind me and understood now where I had taken them: to the doctor’s lodge in the middle of nowhere. “They were old,” he pleaded. “We did them a favor, and the son… that was no way to live.”

I nodded politely and said, “I have to go now,” and finding my resolve, I slammed the trunk closed. Poole shrieked once but then stopped, probably too weak to cry out more than that, and on unsteady legs, I went into the house, where I found the doctor’s keys to his truck.

After that, I transferred George and Walter into the pickup and drove us out of the dark forest, one step closer to home.