Free Green Ice: A Deadly High by Christian Fletcher Page B

when we get back.”
    Trey followed Mancini back along Miramar Street. Mancini had memorized the street address and glanced at the numbers along the buildings, his eyes hidden behind his shades. He didn’t want to give the appearance he was searching for someplace or to look as though he was lost. Street guys liked nothing more than to hustle a stranded vacationer searching for an address.
    Mancini slowly walked by an open gateway , with a few one storey buildings standing to the rear of the property and slightly further away from the roadside. He glanced at the street numbers on either side of the gateway. This was the place he was looking for. It made kind of sense that the bad guys would choose someplace slightly out of plain view.
    “Let’s cross the street,” he muttered to Trey.
    They waited until the traffic receded and walked towards a small liquor store on the opposite side to the open gateway.
    “Go inside and bu y two sodas but don’t speak to the storekeeper and keep away from any cameras as best you can,” Mancini said.
    Trey obliged and returned from the store with two cold bottles of pineapple flavored Jarritos . They stood, leaning against the window, sipping their drinks under the shade of the green canopy, draped over the storefront. Mancini kept his eyes on the property on the opposite side of the road. He saw a nearly new, fawn colored Chevrolet parked nose first in the driveway and guessed it was a rental car. The curtains remained open on both levels of the two storey buildings. Mancini glanced at each of the three orange stucco dwellings in turn. The structure to the far right was smaller and squatter than the other two with a pair of large double doors in the center of the facing wall. He guessed that building was more of a storage area, which wouldn’t be used for accommodation purposes.
    Balcony walkways ran along the outside of the building in the center and the one to the left. Several white painted doors, positioned at regular intervals, stood in a line at the rear of the walkways facing the road. The doors were marked with black numerals and Mancini presumed these were numbered apartments. The problem he now faced was matching up the three guys he was searching for with their respective rooms. He’d briefly met Luiz and Jorge but the third guy, Ernesto, he didn’t know at all. All three were originally from Mexico and would easily blend in with the locals. Mancini had to find a way of figuring out which rooms they were holed up in. He knew trying to call La Rat would be a pointless exercise. The location was obviously the only information he had. One of the mysterious Hector’s guys had probably seen the three men out on the town and followed them back to the apartment block. That was as far as it went for those guys. Now, it was Mancini’s turn to take up the baton and continue the repossession action.
    He counted the number of apartment doors. Five on each floor of the two buildings, which resulted in twenty separate rooms. Presuming the guys didn’t share apartments, Mancini calculated he had a one in six point six chance of finding one of the guys if he started knocking on doors. But he couldn’t guarantee any of them would answer or be inside the apartments. He had to think of another way.
    Mancini didn’t have long to wait before fate intervened.
    The door of apartment twelve, situated in the center building on the upper floor, banged open and a worried looking man in his mid-forties and dressed in nothing but his underwear bundled onto the balcony. He gabbled into his cell phone while glancing around him and repeatedly turned to face the open door of his apartment.
    “That looks like Jorge Alvarez,” Mancini growled. “Come on, let’s go to work.”
    He dropped his soda bottle on the sidewalk and hurried across the road, dodging the traffic in each direction. Trey placed his soda bottle on the store window sill and followed Mancini across the street.
    “Try and stay out