*All character engaged in sexual activity are over the age of 18, in case it's not obvious or mentioned.
*This is a long story intended to span many chapters, please go back and read the previous chapters or else this won't make a lot of sense. If you are looking for a quick fix this probably won't be for you. This story gets violent and reads like a jumbled mess that is my mind. I hope it's at least entertaining.
*Thanks to Alwaysready64, HellCat_Sundry for their help editing this because we become blind to our own mistakes.
*I will denote that dialogue is in Spanish by preceding it with an [S].
*******
After a collective sigh of relief,
my adrenaline wore off and we talked about what to do next. Running from the Cartel/Illuminati was going to be harrowing. If we didn't keep a low profile someone could get hurt or dead.
My idea of how to get the girls across the border was to have the girls bribe some green card holders into letting them borrow their IDs. We would be escorted by someone they knew and would give that person their IDs back along with a second payment. It was a stupid idea, one that was rushed and not thoroughly thought out, but I wasn't given much time to come up with anything better. Now that we were faced with the execution of said stupid plan, it didn't matter anyway because the shootout closed the border crossing, for the day at least, and no one was getting through.
We had to get out of Tecate and fast so we used Google Maps and noticed they had a bus station a couple of blocks from the border crossing, so we ran over to it.
The buses were comparable to the Greyhound Buses in the States in that they were long term bus rides spanning many cities and Mexican states not just intercity transportation.
"So, is there anything available?" Robin asked, a little worried.
"The next bus out of here is booked solid, maybe we can get a taxi or something," I suggested.
"You have money, right?"
"Yeah."
"OK, I have an idea, follow my lead."
Robin was by far the smarter of the 2 girls and she was more talkative. Not that Tracy didn't talk but Robin seemed to take the lead in what they did and said. Tracy was more of a doer than a talker and she was more playful and affectionate and avoided confrontational subject matters; whereas, Robin was always up for a spirited debate especially if it was political. She would often play devil's advocate if she thought you would agree with her position just to get the thrill of an argument. The thing was, I also loved playing devil's advocate and we often argued for hours on subjects until Tracy would say something like 'get a room you two' or something to that effect.
Robin lead us over to a family of four who were obviously waiting for the bus.
[S] "Hello, Sir. You have a lovely family there."
[S] "Thank you miss," he beamed with pride.
[S] "Your wife is so beautiful and your kids are so well behaved," she schmoozed. "Where are you headed?"
It looked like they just lost their home, they had a lot of bags packed including pots and pans and personal items strapped to the outside of their packs.
[S] "Well, I am a little embarrassed - we were just evicted from our home. You see I injured my leg in a car accident a few months ago and I haven't been able to work since then. We are heading to Juarez to stay with family until I get back on my feet."
I saw where she was going with this and I took over.
[S] "We don't want to cause any problems for you and your family but we need to get out of the city today, I was wondering if we could buy your tickets off of you."
[S] "No, I'm afraid I can't do that sir, you see my kids are hungry and we need to leave today."
I pulled out a wad of cash and said, [S] "I tell you what, how about I give you $5000 dollars, plus I buy your four tickets for tomorrow's bus? I bet you can get a room for the night, feed your family and still have enough money..."
"OK!" he interrupted my salesman spiel.
I handed him the cash and he was very grateful and his hungry kids looked excited. I'm guessing it had been more than a day since they ate. I gave him an extra thousand dollars for the bus tickets and they took off.
Tracy gave me a kiss on the cheek, "You are so generous, they would have taken two hundred dollars easy."
"True, but I..."
"I know," she grabbed my hand, looking in my eyes assuring me that she knew I wasn't being frivolous. "You are generous and kind-hearted, that's very rare these days."
Robin leaned in and kissed my other cheek and gave me a hug from the side. For the first time in days I felt like I did something righteous. I always tried to live a virtuous life but for the past week I felt dragged in the mud, dirty, and although I felt the things I did were justifiable I had blood on my hands and a conscience questioning if could I have done anything differently.
The bus came ten minutes later and we got on the bus. Thankfully the roadblocks the police set up were lax and the bus was never searched on its way out of town. The bus was on route 20 that would turn into Federal Highway 2 which followed the border most of the way, then turn south-east avoiding some rough terrain and desert then curved back north-east all the way to Juarez.
The bus route had a stop on the outskirts of Mexicali, which is where we planned on getting off since it had a border crossing. However, Robin quickly became friends with some of the locals on the bus and found out that Mexicali had recently gotten a lot of raids on its caravans and the coyotes were keeping their heads down and not active. It turned out that Juarez was where a lot of them were going to cross the border and most of the people on the bus were in a group headed to one guy in particular -- called El Lobo (The Wolf).
"I think we should go to Juarez and take our chances with El Lobo. You are a white guy, it's going to be hard to find someone that will trust you even if you are being escorted by two beautiful Hispanic women," Robin stated, gesturing at herself and Tracy as if it were obvious they were beautiful.
The bus had room to squeeze three passengers per seat, and although we bought four tickets it didn't give us any extra room as it was packed to the brim with passengers. There were a lot of seats where kids were on the laps of their parents, at least it wasn't as bad as the buses and trains I have seen in countries like India where they not only stacked them and packed them but they were put up on the roof and hung off the sides too.
Robin was next to the window; Tracy was sandwiched in the middle and I had the aisle seat. Tracy was leaned over sleeping in Robin's lap.
"Yeah, but that's about seven to eight hundred miles from here, it will take about four days just to get there. It will probably add a couple of weeks to my journey home."
"Why would you go home, that's the first place they will look for you?"
"I need to make sure my mom is alright."
"She contacted me a couple of days ago about going to see your grandpa. She heard he was in the hospital."
"What? Why didn't you tell me this before?"
"I assumed you would have known that already," she said, looking perturbed. "Besides, we really never had a chance to since we have been running for our lives."
I thought about it and she was right, I was being short fused with her and she didn't deserve it.
"Sorry, you're right. I guess we will figure things out one day at a time."
Robin reached past the sleeping Tracy and held my hand in comfort; she released me as she leaned into the glass to sleep herself. I handed her a poncho from my pack and she used it as a pillow and thanked me before she drifted off to sleep.
It was dark outside and everyone in the bus was fast asleep, so I pulled out my tablet and connected to the web via satellite phone. I put in an encrypted order to my financial planner to purchase a property for me through a shell corporation that I set up. It needed to be secluded and the deed needed to be transferable to whomever I choose at a later date. He got back to me right away, I being his biggest client, and told me that he wasn't sure how to do that legally but he knew the right people to take care of it. He told me that since I wasn't 21 I couldn't legally own the property; the trust would have to own it but he could buy an investment property and make me the "caretaker" of the "investment". He also reminded me that I just received a quarterly interest payment to my private account of another million. Since he had been reinvesting my funds more conservatively into more interest-bearing investments as well as real estate, it would be easy to hide the transactions and give me more money now rather than later. It wasn't the best long-term investment strategy but he knew I needed access as much of my money now. Once again, he was looking out for me.
The bus took us a long way, through a lot of mountainous paths, some desert and some jungle. We only stopped a few times a day excluding bathroom stops that were no longer than 15 minutes. The longer stops were just enough time for the bus driver to get changed out, the bus gassed and the engine spot checked. The passengers were allowed to use the restrooms, get food and clean up during these stops but they never lasted more than a couple of hours. The passengers comfort wasn't their main priority, getting them to their destination fast so they could take the next batch was job one.
After a day of traveling, Tracy got more comfortable with me and would often alternate sleeping in my lap or Robin's. Tracy interrupted a spirited debate between me on Robin on the Brexit issue in order to play a game. Tracy loved to play games. We started playing a game where someone would call out a word, then the next person had to call out a new word that started with the leftmost middle letter of that word, so not only did you have to know how to spell the word but you only had 5 seconds to come up with a new word. We would play it in Spanish and some of the neighboring children would often join in; Robin would even play half the times especially when the kids joined in - both girls seemed to love children. Everything they did contradicted what my father told me about them.
When Robin was reading or bored Tracy would try talking to me.
"What was it like growing up in California? I always hear it's a great place to live."
"Well I'm not sure really, other than my martial arts training and school I really didn't get out much. I did walk around the neighborhood, go to parks and maybe a trip to the mall with George. My mother was always over-protective of me, which I realize now -- why. Not knowing what I know now, kind of led me to resent her growing up."