Free The Mexico Run by Lionel White Page A

Ah, that is understood. You understand?"
        I understood all right.
        "And it will give me added pleasure to have her company when I come down to see you."
        I was wondering if it was going to give Sharon added pleasure.
        I didn't like it. Didn't like it at all. But I said nothing. I knew, however, that sooner or later I was going to have trouble with Captain Hernando Morales.
        

6
        
        By the time I finally wheeled the Jaguar through the sordid shanty-suburb on the outskirts of Tijuana, heading south on Mexican Route 2 for the slightly over one-hundred-kilometer trip to Ensenada, it was well past noon, and it was hot. I was tempted to take the toll road, which would have saved several miles and which had not been completed the last time I had been in Mexico. But I stuck to the old, winding highway bordering the ocean, as I wanted to once again familiarize myself with it. This was the road I would be using during the next weeks and months.
        The faint offshore breeze from the craggy range of hills failed to dissipate the torrid summer heat, and I drove with the top folded back despite the blistering sun. The" sound of the tires on the hot, asphalt pavement combined with the wind whistling by made conversation impossible, and this was the way I wanted it.
        I was thinking about Angel Cortillo. I had talked to him over long distance a few minutes before leaving San Francisco to head south, and I had been tempted to telephone him again before leaving Tijuana. I knew that he had been expecting me to arrive at least forty-eight hours ago, and that he would be wondering what had happened.
        At the last minute I decided not to put the call through. There was the remote possibility that the telephone in my room at the El Camino had been bugged. I could, of course, have made the phone call from a pay booth elsewhere, but with the highly sophisticated electronic devices used today, no telephone conversation from any source is really completely safe. A man can stand five hundred yards away from a telephone booth and be able to overhear a conversation without even tapping the line.
        Of course, I doubted very much that Captain Morales would go to this trouble, but on the other hand I thought it just as well that he know nothing of my relationship with the commercial fishermen I would be meeting in Ensenada. Angel would be wondering what happened to me, but there was really no point in calling him before I arrived. Late or not, I would still find him there.
        I have known Angel Cortillo for more than fifteen years. We first met in the small Texas town where I was born and brought up. We were in high school together. Angel's father was a wet-back who had waded across the Rio Grande to take up illegal residence in Texas, where he opened a chili parlor and brought up his nine orphaned children. Angel and I had been close friends all through high school, played together on the football team and double-dated. After high school, he had gone back to Mexico and finally settled in Baja California.
        We had kept in touch with each other throughout the years, and although it had been more than half a decade since I had last seen him, I was confident that he had changed but little from the boy I had known in my youth. Short, stocky, intelligent, with a ready and attractive wit, Angel Cortillo was ambitious and hard working. He had written me while I was in Vietnam, telling me that he had saved his money and had purchased a commercial fishing boat and was making a fair living.
        When I'd talked to him from San Francisco, I had given no hint of what was really on my mind, but had merely explained that I would be driving south for a brief vacation and would look him up. He had received the news with his usual exuberant enthusiasm, expressing pleasure at the idea of our seeing each other again after so many years.
         "Amigo," he had said, speaking