The Terror of Tijuana Read online

  The Terror of Tijuana

  S. J. Varengo

  Contents

  I. Cogs in A Twisted Machine

  Prologue

  1. Surfing on Black Waves

  2. Morning in The Garden of Good and Evil

  3. Cara Rota

  4. Your Pinup Boy

  5. Two Dinners

  6. The Olmec Battery

  7. The Falling into Place of the Final Improbable Puzzle Piece

  II. The Universe as Trickster

  8. The Hand of God

  9. One Man’s Trash…

  10. Curiouser and Curiouser

  11. 9-1-1

  12. Poetry

  13. Out of Nowhere

  14. Cole-In-The-Box

  15. Two-Dicks

  16. The Great Convergence

  17. Jacks or Better to Open, Cleaners’ Wild

  18. The Convoy

  19. Rooftops

  20. A Forgotten Little Circle

  An Interview with S. J. Varengo

  Also by S. J. Varengo

  Copyright © 2019 by S. J. Varengo

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  For my cousin Jeannette, my longest-known new reader, for Jinx, Banjo, and especially Ditty, and as always, for Littlewing.

  I

  Cogs in A Twisted Machine

  Prologue

  The nest was well-hidden. He would have allowed himself to say “invisible,” but he knew hubris was death, and death was a commodity of which he wished to remain solely a distributor. Via Coporativo was not the tallest building in Tijuana, but the twenty-five floors beneath his feet lifted him sixty meters into the air, perched and ready. That felt just about right.

  He peered through the scope of his loud-stick. Ever since he was a child, he had been amazed by looking through telescopes and binoculars, at how they destroyed distance and brought the thing he desired so close, he could touch it. He would touch his desires today. Oh, how he would touch them.

  From here, he could see the many new, upscale buildings that marked modern Tijuana, putting on display the city’s efforts to rid itself of its seamy reputation. Fewer dark holes housing the infamous girl and donkey shows, and more skyscrapers like the one he now stood atop, or unique structures like the nearby World of Sports with its football field rooftop.

  He stood for many hours waiting to see his desires. They were easy to spot right away, with their blonde hair and their American college tee shirts pulled tightly over their young, flawless bodies. How he hated the gringa, coming south from San Diego every day to explore exotic Mexico.

  And exotic Mexicans.

  He had often walked among them, drunken and laughing idiotas, parading around in their painted-on pastels and their puta high heels. Once he imagined them to be magical creatures, sent from heaven to worship and adore him.

  But they had laughed at him. They had passed him by, stealing a frowning glance at his misshapen face, or worse still, didn’t see him at all.

  He still desired them, but for different reasons now, and with different equipment. He’d been shown a new way.

  This part of the city, the Zona Urbana Rio, was not a particularly popular spot for the harpy day-tourists, and he realized that the next time he sought his desires, he would probably pick an area more popular to the American girls, and one less designed to attract the attention of their wealthy fathers. But for his first time, his first chance to watch the flower bloom, he wanted to stand above them, to teach them that he was higher than them, that he was more important. A man to be respected and served.

  She walked directly into the frame of the rifle scope, and he had to catch his breath. Here was his desire! She was with two other friends, both college-aged girls like herself, but with darker hair and less perfect forms. All three were laughing at something; he could see their evil smiles even from so high in the sky. Though they could not see him, he somehow sensed it was he that was the subject of their derisive mirth. They were laughing at his face, just as everyone had since he could remember. Not for the first time, he cursed his addict mother, dead now for a dozen years. He’d been taught. Made to understand. So now he cursed her and her refusal to stop poisoning herself, and by extension, him as he grew in her womb. When his disfigured head had emerged, she’d told him many times, the midwife had gasped and made the sign of the cross so many times and so rapidly that the motion of her hands caused the only breeze in the room, cooling her sweating brow as she labored to push el demonio pequeño, the little demon, from her body.

  The bitch’s laughing fit had caused them to stand still, just long enough. The rifle was already loaded, cocked and hungry. As their levity began to fade, he laughed once himself.

  It seemed to him that he hadn’t even pulled the trigger. The shot seemed like it came from far away. But he still put the bullet right in the middle of her perfect, smiling face, and watched with glee as it exploded, and she dropped to the concrete sidewalk like a sack of puppies into a well. Her friends screamed and ran in two different directions, la perra’s blood spraying onto their designer slut-suits.

  He took his time packing the gun into its carrying case. He knew the building well and would be long gone, never seen, before the police arrived and the forensics team could determine the angle at which the bullet smashed through her face, turn their heads, and look to the roof of the Via Corporativo. He detached the scope, but before he put it in its felt-lined nest, he held it to his eye one final time and smiled a twisted, broken smile as he saw the spreading pool of sangre forming a crimson halo around her head. I have given you a gift, a decoration that you will surely not receive in the afterlife, he thought with another quiet laugh.

  In the distance, he heard sirens, and he packed the scope away, closed the latches on the case, and walked calmly to the freight elevator, whose doors bore matching signs reading “Descompuesto” on every door of the building’s twenty-five stories, as well as in the basement. It was, in fact, working fine, but even in the bright and modern Tijuana, people were well acquainted with broken things. Perhaps not to the degree he was, but certainly enough that an elevator being out of order was nothing that would merit further inspection. Even the sound of it functioning wouldn’t necessarily cause anyone to think the sign was lying to them. They would assume it was being worked on.

  He rode the downward-sprinting car to the basement, and he heard the paper sign that he had taped in place in the predawn hours tear in half as the doors opened to the dim light and stale air of the underground enclosure. The building was only seven years old, but basements were basements, new or otherwise, and when he passed through it, he did so quickly. Not out of any fear of discovery, but because it smelled like the home in which he’d been born, and his mother had died.

  Once outside, he walked away from the now bustling crime scene, exiting the building from the opposite side and disappearing quickly into the milling crowds of suited businessmen and the overall-wearing workers whose jobs supported the wealthy but who themselves would forever struggle to put food on their family’s table.

  Later that night, he watched el noticias de tele and smiled when they showed the flashing lights and the blood-stained sheet covering the body. It was certainly newsworthy, certainly enjoyable to see his power on public display. But it would be nothing compared to what would follow.

  1

  Surfing on Black Waves

  Darlene Mason probably spent more time on the internet than anyone she knew. As the inevitable rise of technology continued to conne
ct everyone and everything together, many medical professionals had begun to consider the degree of connectivity that she regularly practiced to be dangerous, perhaps even pathological.

  But Darlene wasn’t looking at shoes or curios with which to decorate the farmhouse. She wasn’t looking at videos of cats or sassy toddlers, and she wasn’t playing “Candy Crush” on Facebook.

  She scoured the internet for up to twelve hours a day (most of them, like now, at night while the rest of her family slept), looking for what to most people would seem like discreet, unconnected scraps of news.

  Darlene had, like her protégée and best friend, Nicole Porter, once worked as a “cleaner.” This was a term used by her organization as a less attention-grabbing alternative to “assassin.” They rarely used that word at all, and Darlene no longer even allowed the thought of it in her head. She’d been a cleaner. Nicole was a cleaner. The organization was called simply Cleanup Crew.

  It was called that because one arm of the group actually functioned in the public eye as a forensic cleaning service, with “franchises” all over the world. The men and women who operated in that branch were experts at removing all traces of blood and other material from crime scenes and suicides after the police had finished their investigations. Those same Cleanup Crew workers were also experts at collecting evidence that the police overlooked, and they had more than once passed information along to her that aided in the clandestine arm of the group.

  Cleanup Crew had been in existence for much longer than Nicole or even Darlene had been involved, although its full origin story was obscured by the mist of many passing years. Darlene had once heard that it might have originated as a somewhat less pacifist arm of the Underground Railroad, and while she would have liked very much for that to be true, she had always considered the anecdote to be apocryphal. At any rate, the name must have always been a little tongue in cheek.

  Regardless of its shrouded inception, the group was now active world-wide, in far more places than there were Cleanup Crew storefronts, and while there were a handful of others who filled the same role as Darlene, she was recognized as the best at what she did.

  Darlene was a “controller.” It was a somewhat deceptive term. It stemmed more from a person in that position doing the majority of their work from a “control center.” At the Mason’s farm, the control center was a hidden room, accessed via a hidden door in her husband Wally’s study. She didn’t so much control the actions of the cleaners, handlers, erasers, and other operatives as she did watch for patterns that might indicate something larger was happening than the apparently unrelated events themselves would indicate. Then, when she felt action was merited, it was her job to put things in motion.

  The angry red numbers on the digital clock that sat on her desk indicated it was just before one a.m., and Darlene was a little bleary-eyed. Okay, a lot bleary-eyed, she thought. It had been a long day on the farm, as she’d had to assist Wally with a tricky calf birth and had baked fifteen pies for their twin daughters, Abigale and Victoria, to sell at the roadside farm stand tomorrow. Summertime was always busy on the farm, but having the teen girls home from school took some of the burden off of her and Wally. Unfortunately, it often meant more work; to wit, the bake-a-thon earlier.

  However the balance played out, it wasn’t making her any less sleepy right now. In fact, she was just about to close down her Tor browser and head upstairs to climb into the big sleigh-bed next to Wally, when a popup appeared.

  Darlene’s online experience tended to differ from that of the average person. For example, Joe Regular was not running hundreds of search bots, which scoured the web for certain keywords, triggering a popup when one was encountered with a link to the full item. Often, these came from mainstream news sources. Other times, however, the source was from a road less travelled. As in this case.

  The popup generated by the robot had been prompted when an intra-agency memo had sent word that an American college student had been brutally murdered in Mexico. Specifically, in the border city of Tijuana. The agency involved happened to be the CIA. Darlene knew that, officially, the CIA brass would probably object strongly if they knew that their internal network was being monitored by one of Darlene’s bots, but there were actually operatives in the agency who did know, and who had no grievance whatsoever. On more than one occasion, the Company had reached out to CUC for assistance in a particularly messy international situation. It still caused Darlene to shake her head when she thought that there were cases that even the CIA found too dirty to touch.

  The link, when clicked, immediately opened the memo, which indicated that one Janice Meadows had been day-tripping in Tijuana with some friends but had disappeared from the bar in which they were drinking. She had apparently left to use the restroom and never returned.

  “That’s why girls always go pee in pairs or better,” she said aloud as she moved the memo into a file marked “Border.” She then examined the other items in the folder. The first was from early in June, showing news footage of a young woman who had, the theory went, been shot by a sniper atop a tall office building. There were two other bits from Tijuana, one about a girl who’d been stabbed to death in an alley next to a dance club and another about a UCLA student who had fallen from the fifth floor of a parking garage. She had realized when she’d saved that one that it could have easily been an accident, or sadly, a suicide.

  But her gut told her it wasn’t. And since that item had been tucked in, there were four others, all involving young American women, all seemingly random acts of violence.

  And now, apparently, this situation had caught the attention of the CIA. It was the final sentence of the Company memo that chased all the weariness from her head. “This makes eight murders in two months.”

  She’d tracked only six prior to this, so there was one she’d missed somehow. But they hadn’t. A moment later, her cell phone began to vibrate. The screen indicated that the caller was سيد أسود, which was Arabic for “Mr. Black.” Darlene didn’t speak any Arabic but had relied on Google Translate to make her somewhat banal code name for him a little less trite, at least on the screen. He was the only person in her phone whose name appeared in that language, which was good, because to her eyes, Mr. Black and Pumpkin Spice would have looked identical in the foreign script, and there was no picture to accompany the name.

  “Wow, that was quick,” she said to herself as she picked up the phone. Mr. Black was, of course, one of her Agency contacts.

  “Did you see?” said the voice of a man she knew well but had never been able to connect to a face.

  “Yes. Eight?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “I’ve tracked only seven.”

  “The one you missed was actually the second over-all and was reported as a suicide.”

  “I still should have caught that. That’s one of the main crawler phrases.”

  “It wasn’t reported. In fact, it was the opposite of reported.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Blacked out completely. The victim was the stepdaughter of Max Dandridge.”

  “Not familiar,” Darlene said, furrowing her brow.

  “He’s a member of the San Diego Board of Supervisors. He pulled some strings and was able to keep it out of the headlines.”

  “Not even a coroner’s report? I would have seen one.”

  “There was one, but it was done in the States. In Texas, actually. Dandridge wanted to keep it insulated. Your crawlers probably did catch it, but didn’t find it noteworthy, separated by considerable distance from both where it happened and where she was from.”

  “Shit.” Darlene superimposed the word over a long sigh.

  “Indeed.”

  “You guys must have some sort of leads if you’ve connected the dots to this degree.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? We’ve certainly had operatives poking around, albeit from a shadowy distance, but while we’re becoming gradually convinced there should be a connection—must be,
even—we’re damned if we can find it. If one person is doing this, he or she has never used the same technique twice. There’s no M.O. at all, other than the fact that the vics are all U.S. citizens, all women, all about the same age, and were all partying, it would appear, in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico.”

  “What are the locals thinking?”

  “The Policia Municipal haven’t turned up anything and are publicly saying nothing, hoping, as usual, that if they ignore it, the problem will go away. The Federales have the situation on their radar but are basically clueless.”

  “Does it feel political to you, Black?”

  “To be honest, no. It feels personal.”

  “My take too. The Company wants its hands kept clean in this situation, I’m guessing?”

  “What situation?”

  Darlene smiled at the agent’s joke. Obviously, the CIA was not even officially acknowledging that there was anything untoward at all. The back office memo had been in a deep recess of the agency network. Although the motive wasn’t necessarily political, the climate in that area between Mexico and their benevolent friends to the north was not exactly balmy at present. The Company would do all they could to remain officially uninvolved.

  “That’s fine, but I can’t send a cleaner to take out an invisible man. I need a mark.”

  “I know. I’m going to keep my finger on this, and if I get anything, I’ll write a memo. Set a bot to search for “Cogswell.”